Dewey Lambdin - The King`s Commission

"Secure from Quarters. Issue the rum and a cold dinner."

They did catch the ketch, nearly one hour later, prowling up to her starboard side with the advantage of the wind-gauge. One ball from the larboard battery settled the matter, splashing close abeam to ricochet into her upper-works and shatter a bulwark, raising a concerted howl of terror. The ketch lowered her colors and rounded up into the wind quickly, while the howling continued.

"Jesus, what's all that noise?" Alan wondered aloud as one of the boats was led around from being towed astern to the entry port.

"I suspect yon Dago is a slaver, Mister Lewrie," Lilycrop said sadly. "We're upwind where we can't smell her, but keep a tight hold on your dinner once you get inboard. Now, away the boardin' party before they change their feeble minds."

The winds were freshening, and the sea heaved a little more briskly as Alan sat down on a thwart in the cutter. The captain's cox'n got the boat's crew working at the oars, and within moments they were butting against the side of the ketch, and Alan was scrambling up the mizzen chains to swing over the low rail, glad to have pulled it off without getting soaked or drowned.

"Jesus!" He gagged once he was firmly on his feet, and the men from the boarding party were following him up onto the ketch's decks.

It stank like an abattoir, brassy with corruption, almost sweet like decomposing man-flesh, mingled with the odor of excrement and stale sweat, of foul bilges and rot. Most ships smelled to a certain extent, but he had never, aboard a prize or a well-found Royal Navy ship even after a desperate battle, smelled the like, and his stomach roiled in protest.

An officer walked up to him, a sullen brute in rumpled and soiled breeches and shirt, legs exposed by lack of shoes or stockings. He began to rattle off a rapid burst of Spanish, which was definitely one of the world's languages that Alan lacked, and Alan waved him off, trying to shut him up.

"You the captain?" he asked when the man took a breath.

"Capitano, si." The man swept off a battered cocked hat small enough to fit a child, dripping though it was with gold lace and feathers, and introduced himself with a deep congй. "Capitano Manuel Antonio Lopez, Capitano de Las Nuestra Seсora de Compostela."

"Lewrie," Alan said bluffly as an Englishman should. "Shrike," he added, pointing back toward his ship. "Royal Navy. Your sword, sir."

All the man had to offer was a cutlass stuck into a sash, which Alan passed on to his man Cony. There was one passenger, a man of much more worth, by his clothing. He was tall and slim, partly Indian in his features, but adorned with a stiff waxed mustache. He, too, offered his sword, this one a slim smallsword awash in pearls and silver wire, damascened with gold around the hilt and guard. He was elegant, a dandy-prat in the height of Spanish fashion.

"Seсor, I must talk to your captain," he began in passable English. "It shall be of great value to him."

"And what brings you aboard this voyage, sir?" Alan asked, fanning his face to push away the stinks.

"She carries my cargo, senor."

"Slaves?"

"Si, seсor. Fifty prime blacks bought in Santo Domingo."

Alan took a look about the deck. The ketch (and he could not even begin to remember her name, much less pronounce it) would have been a well-found vessel, if she received a thorough cleaning. The rigging was thin as a purser's charity, but that could be set right. There were only four carriage guns, bronze or brass three-pounders-no value there. Most of her armament, he noted with surprise, consisted of swivels and bell-mouthed fowling pieces aimed down at her hatches and waist, evidently to control the slaves should they get loose.

"I must speak to your captain, sir. You are?"

"Lewrie, Lieutenant."

"Allow me to introduce myself, senor. I am Don Alonzo Victorio Garcia de Zaza y Turbide." The man rushed through a formal introduction. "I assure you, Teniente, it shall be most pleasing to your captain if I am allowed to speak to him."

"Pleasing how?" Alan asked, getting rapidly fed up with the over-elegant posturing of this stiff-necked hidalgo.

"To his profit, senor," the man beamed back with a sly smile.

"I think a well-found ketch and fifty prime blacks for resale in Kingston is profit enough, don't you?" Alan smirked.

"I do not care about the blacks, seсior. The world is full of slaves," Don Miguel sneered. "Nor do I much care about this little ship. But if I go to Kingston, then I am prisoner, si? And there is no profit for me in that. I ask, as a gentleman, as a knight of Spain, to be set ashore. I can pay well, seсior. In gold," he added.

"By all means, Don Thingummy, talk to my captain. I'm sure he'll simply adore talking to you!" Alan laughed. "Cony!"

Alan sent the aristocrat, the ship's captain, and her small crew over to Shrike for safe-keeping, while he and the rest of the boarding party sorted the freed lines out and got a way on the ketch, headed out to sea, with Shrike following in her wake. He had half a dozen hands, half a dozen Marines, and a bosun's mate, plus his man Cony to keep order aboard. Once he got his people apportioned at duty stations, he led the rest to search the ship.

"Godamercy, sir," Cony gasped as they opened the hatch gratings.

Crammed in between bales and crates of cargo were fifty slaves, naked as the day they were born, chained together with ankle shackles into two rows on either side of the hold, their wrists also bound by cuffs and lighter chain. They were squatting or lying in their own filth that did not drain off into the bilges. They glared up at him angrily, some begging for water with cupping motions by their mouths, some rubbing their bellies for food and miming the motions of eating.

"Godamercy, sir!" Cony said again. "Hit's devilish the way them Dagoes treat people. We oughter feed 'em, sir. Give 'em water an' some air. 'Tain't Christian ta do otherwise, sir."

"Well, they don't look exactly glad to see us, Cony."

"'Course they ain't sir!" Cony burst out. "I 'spect they thinks we're Dagoes, too, Mister Lewrie."

"Corporal?"

"Sir!"

"Fetch 'em up, one coffle at a time. Use those swivels and such if they get out of hand. Cony, break out a butt of water and see if there's some food about," Alan relented.

The slaves were fresh from Dahomey or some other port on the Ivory Coast, for they cringed away from their liberators just as they had from their captors. They drank the water, ate the cold mush and stale bread as if it was manna from heaven, but stayed in a tight clutch of flesh away from the muskets of the Marines and sailors who kept an eye on them. Easy bantering from sympathetic English humors did nothing to reassure them, even if they could have understood the words.

"Murray, take charge of the deck," Alan told the bosun's mate, and went below to search the captain's quarters and those of the distinguished passenger, who was by now getting his ears roasted by Lieutenant Lilycrop for trying to bribe a Royal Navy officer.

He gathered up all the papers he could find, not able to read a word of them, hoping Lilycrop or one of the warrants had some Spanish for later scanning. The captain's quarters were spartan in the extreme, not from the usual sailor's suspicion of anyone given to too many airs and comforts as was rife in the Royal Navy, but from poverty, he assumed. Even the captain's wine cabinet could offer nothing better than a locally grown wine of dubious palate, and some fearsome rum. After one sip, he spat the mouthful on the canvas covered deck and put the bottle back in the rack.

Don Thingummy's cabins, though, were a different matter. Some attempt had been made to pack away valuables, for all the chests and trunks had been locked, and Alan was just about to search for a lever with which to pry the first of the locks and hasps off when the sound of gunfire erupted from the deck, forcing him to sprint back topsides.

"What the hell happened?" he demanded, sword in hand.

"This'un went for't' corpr'l's musket, sir." Murray panted from excitement or sudden exertion. "They wuz beginnin' t' smile'n all, sir, an' then, when we wuz gonna put 'em below once agin, this'n jumped us!"

One of the slaves lay stretched out and dead on the planks, bleeding like a spilled wine keg, another keened and rocked with agony after being shot in the shoulder; the others tried to draw back from the casualties to the full extent of their leg chains.

"Christ, what a muck-up!" Alan sighed, sheathing his sword. "Pop him over the side, then. Corporal, can you get the shackles undone? And see if anything can be done for the one wounded."

"Aye aye, sir."

"I saw some keys in the captain's quarters. Try there. And I also saw some rum. He might feel like a drop. Fetch that, too."

Cony knelt down next to the wounded slave and tried to staunch the flow of blood from the purple-plum entry wound, which was not bleeding all that badly. He gently pushed him down and rolled him a little so he could see the back, where the ball had exited high up.

"Shot clean through, sir," Cony said with a grin. "No ball in 'im ta fester, there's a blessin'. Easy now, bucko, lay easy. Rum's a'comin', cure for damn near ever'thin'. You'll be alright."

The corporal came back with a huge ring of keys and fiddled at the shackles until he found one that unlocked the dead man from the coffle. He then knelt at the feet of the wounded slave and undid his ankle shackles.

"Stap me, sir!" Cony wailed in disappointment. "'E's dead!"

"Dead? Of that?" Alan asked, bewildered as the next man.

"Guns is magic, sir," Murray the bosun's mate said softly. "If'n 'e wuz island born an' used ta us'n, 'e'd a lived, but direck from 'is tribe not three month, if'n yer shot, yer killed, so 'e believed 'e wuz dead an' that's that."

"Jesus, they believe that?"

"Aye, sir. Ask Andrews, sir, 'e were a slavey," Murray insisted.

Andrews was one of their West Indian hands, signed aboard as a volunteer, an almost white-skinned Negro, like one of Hugh Beauman's favored bed-partners.

Alan turned to look at him, and Andrews shrank away, after glaring at Murray with alarm. Alan thought there was more to his sudden fear, so he crossed the deck to stand beside him and speak softly.

"Is it true they die so easily, Andrews?"

"Aye, sah. Dey b'lieve a witch can put a curse on 'em an' dey lays down an' dies of it. First dey see o' white men, dey learn about guns. Sometimes dey die o' just bein' shot at, sah. Just feel da bullet go pas' an' lay down an' die," Andrews informed him.

"Poor bastard."

"Aye, sah, poor bastard. All of 'em."

"You were a slave?"

"No sah, Mista Murray got it wrong, sah. Ah weren't no slave!"

"You're a freeborn volunteer. But you must have talked with slaves to know what you know," Alan pointed out.

"Freeborn volunteer, sah," Andrews insisted.

"But not a sailor, eh? Before?"

"I worked wit' my father, sah, fishin' sometimes."

Were you, indeed, Alan thought, skeptical of Andrews' claims. The man had written his name instead of making his mark when he signed aboard; Alan had offered the book to him himself. If he was not a runaway servant, then Alan was a Turk in a turban.

He was a well set-up young fellow, near an inch taller than Alan's five feet nine, his skin the color of creamed coffee, and his eyes clear instead of clouded. A former house-servant run off for his own reasons? Alan wondered. Whatever his background was, he wanted to keep it quiet.