– and I’d like to run south again down Africa with a fair wind. In a private yacht, with my youth, half a dozen assorted Parisian whores, the finest of food and drink, and perhaps a German band. Aye, it’s a man’s life.
That land we had sighted was the Guinea Coast, which was of no interest to us, because as Kirk assured me it was played out for slaving. The growing sentiment for abolition at home, the increasing number of nations who joined with England in fighting the trade, the close blockade of the coast by British and Yankee patrol ships, who burned the slave stations and pounced on the ships – all these things were making life more difficult in the blackbird trade in the ’forties. In the old days, the slavers had been able to put in openly, and pick up their cargoes, which had been collected by the native chiefs and herded into the great pens, or barracoons, at the river mouths. Now it wasn’t so easy, and speed and secrecy were the thing, which was why fast ships like the Balliol College were at an advantage.
And of course clever slavers like Spring knew exactly where to go for the best blacks and which chiefs to deal with – this was the great thing. Your slaver might easily dodge the patrols on the way in and out – for it was a huge coast, and the Navy couldn’t hope to watch it all – but unless he had a good agent ashore, and a native king who could keep up a supply of prime nigs, he was sunk. It’s always amused me to listen to the psalm-smiting hypocrisy of nigger-lovers at home and in the States who talk about white savages raping the Coast and carrying poor black innocents into bondage – why, without the help of the blacks themselves we’d not have been able to lift a single slave out of Africa. But I saw the Coast with my own eyes, you see, which the Holy Henriettas didn’t, and I know that this old wives’ tale of a handful of white pirates mastering the country and kidnapping as they chose, is all my eye. We couldn’t have stayed there five minutes if the nigger kings and warrior tribes hadn’t been all for it, and traded their captured enemies – aye, and their own folk, too – for guns and booze and Brummagem rubbish.
Why my pious acquaintances won’t believe this, I can’t fathom. They enslaved their own kind, in mills and factories and mines, and made ’em live in kennels that an Alabama planter wouldn’t have dreamed of putting a black into. Aye, and our dear dead St William Wilberforce cheered ’em on, too – weeping his pious old eyes out over niggers he had never seen, and d--ning the soul of anyone who suggested it was a bit hard to make white infants pull coal sledges for twelve hours a day. Of course, he knew where his living came from, I don’t doubt. My point is: if he and his kind did it to their people, why should they suppose the black rulers were any different where their kinsfolk were concerned? They make me sick, with their pious humbug.
But it’s all by the way; the main thing is that Spring had a good black king to work with, a horrible old creature named Gezo, who lorded it over the back country of Dahomey. Now that the Windward Coast wasn’t the place any more, and the slavers were concentrating round the corner in the White Man’s Grave, stretches like Dahomey and Benin and the Oil rivers were where the real high jinks were to be found. The Navy lay in all the time at places like Whydah and Lagos, and your sharp captains like Spring were as likely as not to use the lonelier rivers and lagoons, where they could load up at their leisure, provided no one spotted ’em coming in.14
After our first landfall we bore away south, and came eastabout to Cape Palmas, where you could see the palm trees that gave it its name down by the water’s edge, and so along the Ivory Coast and Gold Coast past Three Points to Whydah, where we put into the open roads. Spring had the Stars and Stripes at the masthead, and was safe enough, for there wasn’t a Yankee in port. There were two British naval sloops, but they wouldn’t come near us – this was where the slavers scored, Kirk told me; the Yanks wouldn’t let any but their own navy search an American ship, so our blue-jackets would interfere only with Portuguese and Spaniards and so on.
We lay off, looking at the long yellow beach with the factories and barracoons behind it, and the huge rollers crashing on the sand, and it was as hot as hell’s kitchen. I watched the kites diving and snatching among the hundreds of small craft plying about between ships and shore, and the great Kroo canoes riding the surf, and tried to fan away the stench that rose from all the filth rotting on the oily water. I remembered what Kinnie had said:
‘Oh, sailor, beware of the Bight o’ Benin.
There’s one as comes out for a hundred goes in.’
You could smell the sickness on the wind, and I wondered why Spring, who was talking at the rail with Sullivan and scanning the shore with his glass, had put in here. But presently out comes a big Kroo canoe, with half a dozen niggers on board, who hailed us, and for the first time I heard that queer Coast lingo which passes for a language from Gambia to the Cape.
‘Hollo, Tommy Rot,’ cries Spring, ‘where Pedro Blanco?’15
‘Hollo, sah,’ sings out one of the Kroos. ‘He lib for Bonny; no catch two, three week.’
‘Why he no lib for come? Him sabby me make palaver, plenty plenty nigras. Come me plenty good stuff, what can do, him lib Bonny?’
‘Him say Spagnole fella, Sanchez, lib for Dahomey ribber. Him make strong palaver, no goddam bobbery. You take Tommy Rot, sah, catch Rum Punch, Tiny Tim, plenty good fella, all way ribber. Make good nigra palaver wid Spagnole fella, no Inglish Yankee gunboat.’
Spring cursed a bit at all this; it seemed he had been hoping to meet one Pedro Blanco at Whydah, but the Krooboy Tommy Rot was telling him instead he should make for a river where a Spaniard named Sanchez would supply him with slaves. Spring didn’t like it too much.
‘Blanco bobbery b-----d,’ says he. ‘Me want him make palaver King Gezo one time.’
‘Palaver sawa sawa,’ bawls the Kroo. ‘Sanchez lib for Gezo, lib for you, all for true.’
‘He’d better,’ growls Spring. ‘All right, Tommy Rot, come aboard, catch Tiny Tim, ten fella, lib for ship, sabby?’
We took on a dozen of the Kroos, grinning, lively blacks who were great favourites among the Coast skippers. They were prime seamen, but full of tricks, and went by ridiculous names like Rum Punch, Blunderbuss, Jumping Jack, Pot Belly and Mainsail. Each one had his forehead tattooed blue, and his front teeth filed to points; I thought they were cannibals, but it seems they carried these marks so that they would be recognised as Kroos and therefore wouldn’t be taken as slaves.
With them aboard, the Balliol College stood out from Whydah, and after two days sniffing about out of sight of land we put in again farther east, on to a long low rotting coast-line of mangrove crawling out into the sea among the sunken sandbars. It looked d----d unpleasant to me, but Spring at the wheel brought her through into a lagoon, beyond which lay a great delta of jungle-covered islands, and through these we came to what looked like a river mouth. We inched through the shoals, with everyone hauling and sweating at the sweeps, and the Kroos out ahead in canoes, while three men either side swung the lead incessantly, chanting ‘Three fathom, two and a half, two and Jesus saves, two and a half, two and Jesus saves, three fathom!’
And then, round the first bend, was a clearing, and huge stockades between river and jungle, and huts, and presently a fat Dago in a striped shirt with a hankie round his head and rings in his ears comes out in a small boat, all smiles, to meet a great storm of abuse from Spring.
‘You’re Sanchez, are you? And where the h--l’s my cargo? Your barracoons are empty, you infernal scoundrel! Five hundred blacks I signed for with that thieving blackguard, Pedro Blanco, and look yonder!’ He flung out an arm towards the empty stockades, in which the only sign of life was a few figures idling round a cooking-fire. ‘D---l a black hide in sight apart from your own! Well, sir?’
The Dago was full of squealing apologies, waving his arms and sweating. ‘My dear Captain Spring! Your fears are groundless. Within two days there will be a thousand head in the barracoons. Pedro Blanco has taken order. King Gezo himself has come down country – especially on your behalf, my good sir. He is at Dogba, with his people; there has been much fighting, I understand, but all quiet now. And many, many nigras in his slave train – strong young men, hardy young women – all the