The Castaways (23 page)
“He tried to murder Midge.”
She put her hand to her mouth, and then to her heart—the very picture of surprise. But I wasn’t ready to believe her innocent. “He’s dead now,” I said. “He’s gone.”
“And Midge is safe? Yes, of course he is; I see him there.” She sighed, as though with relief.
“The King’s dead too,” I told her.
She nodded. “I know it doesn’t speak kindly for me, but I didn’t feel much sorrow, Tom. He could be a charming man, but what a schemer. I never trusted him.”
“But you left him to look after Mr. Moyle,” I said. “You were off the ship as quick as a shot, and you didn’t care what happened after.”
“That’s not true!” she cried. “I went to see my brother. I wasn’t gone more than two or three hours. Gaskin was on the ship, and Weedle too, and there was no reason to think anything would go wrong. But when I got back the ship was at the dock, and it was deserted. Utterly empty. I called for the King, but there was no answer. Even Mr. Moyle had vanished. The next morning I was told that the King had been murdered. What do you think I made of all that? Can’t you imagine how I worried about Midge and you?”
At last I believed she was telling the truth. Her story matched with what I knew in every way but one. If she really returned to the ship after two or three hours, the King should still have been there. But I could imagine him hiding from her, staying silent in the dark as she searched and shouted.
“Tom, please,” said Calliope. “I’ve been looking for you and Midge ever since. I’ve been haunting the river like a spirit. Is there any chance you’ll forgive me?”
Midgely tugged my sleeve. I didn’t know he’d come up beside me, or that he’d heard the whole exchange. “Tell her you’ll forgive her, Tom, if she comes along as captain.”
That was good enough for me. She came aboard that night, with a great roll of charts and a library about pilotage and the South Seas. I was amused to see among the books a copy of the very same one that had set Midgely thinking about elephant islands. And of course she brought along
Charlotte, because Midgely wouldn’t have allowed for anything else.
It was hardly possible, but the girl was even more of a delight without the King around. A tiny twin of her mother, she seemed as free and wild as a rabbit in a field. I loved to see her, but it bothered me that she didn’t appear to miss the King at all. “He wasn’t much of a man,” I said to Midgely on the day before we sailed. “But as awful as he was, he was still her father.”
“No, he weren’t,” said Midge. “She called him daddy, but he weren’t that. Her real father was a sailor what was drowned at sea when Charlotte was one year old.”
We were sitting on the capstan in Limehouse Reach as the crew prepared to sail. Charlotte was setting up her tea table beside the mainmast, and the sailors had to weave around her in their work. But none minded, and all smiled.
“Calliope met the King not even two years ago,” said Midge. “She put an advert in the agonies, looking for a husband so that Charlotte wouldn’t have to grow up without a proper name.”
Inwardly, I laughed. It seemed that every single thing the King had told me had been a lie.
“Charlotte never liked the King very much,” said Midge.
“No wonder,” I said. “He was such a liar and a schemer. I’m glad Charlotte’s not like that. She’ll always be nice.”
“Maybe not, Tom. When I was little like her, I was nice too. But then I turned wicked.”
“You did?” I said. There was no one less wicked than Midgely.
“Oh, yes I did,” said he.
I knew that Midgely had been put on the hulk for buffing dogs, but I really had no idea what else he might have done. He grimaced now, and blushed, and I suddenly thought he was going to tell me a terrible tale.
“There was old sailors around when I was little,” he said. “They’d been in the wars, and some of them had lost their arms or legs. There was some what had lost their eyes, and them blind ones sold pencils on the street. They kept their pencils in little cups.”
“Yes, I know,” I said.
“Well, Tom, I used to nip up and knock over them cups,” said Midge. “Then I’d laugh and run away. Now that’s wicked, ain’t it, Tom? That’s wicked through and through. I think maybe it’s why I’m blinded now myself. It’s payment, ain’t it?”
“No, don’t think like that,” I said. “Midge, you’re the kindest person I know.”
He was certainly beloved of all aboard. His galley was already a favored place to sit and talk, and he was spending his days listening to the most stirring tales of the sea, tales that would be told over and over for him alone in the months ahead.
At the far end of the ship, Calliope appeared at the wheel. Her long dress rippled with the breeze. She looked at the shore, at our mooring lines, up to the high clouds that were flying to the east. She was smiling.
“I was stupid to think that Calliope could hurt you,” I said.
“Yes, Tom, you was,” said Midge.
It embarrassed me, the things I’d thought. I’d never confessed them to Calliope.
“I shouldn’t have believed the King,” I told Midge.
“He was a good liar.”
“I even believed Mr. Goodfellow,” I said. “He told me Calliope had a scheme about a ship.”
“Oh, that’s true, Tom. She did,” said Midgely.
“What ship?”
He tapped his knuckles on the deck.
“
This
one?” I said. “You mean she was really after this ship and the diamond after all?”
“No, just the ship, Tom,” said Midge.
“What was her scheme?”
He sat silent for a while, leaning against the mast. The sun was shining straight in his face, and I could see one of his eyeballs—or a part of it—gray as mud.
“What was she planning?” I asked.
“Tom, she doesn’t want you to know that,” said Midge. “If I tell, you have to swear I never let on.”
I gave my promise, but still he hesitated. Then he touched my arm. “She wanted Mr. Goodfellow to give her the ship, or to
lend
her the ship, so she could go back to the islands and look for your father.”
I was now even more ashamed. “She was trying to help me?” I said. “And I repaid her with curses?”
“Oh, she don’t know if you cursed her,” said Midge. “It don’t matter now anyway. She’s sailing the ship like she wanted, and she says you’re a fine young man.”
I would have asked for no better praise. I looked up at the quarterdeck, to Calliope at the wheel. Over the clamoring
noise of the ship and the city, she shouted for all to hear: “Ready to cast off!” Then she looked at me. “You, there, look alive!”
Both Midge and I stood up. He turned toward the docks. “I was born here, Tom,” he said. “Me mam’s just over there.”
It was the first time in the week we’d spent at the dock that he’d even mentioned his mother. He hadn’t asked to be taken to her, or even asked
about
her.
“Why didn’t you say something sooner?” I said.
“She didn’t want me when she had me, Tom,” he said with a shrug. “I was afraid if she saw me now she’d turf me out again. I’d rather just remember.”
He went to the cookhouse, and I to the shore. The curricle I’d gotten from Mr. Goodfellow was there beside the ship. I gathered the reins and handed them to a rag picker who was passing with his barrow. “Will you hold these for me please?” I asked.
He took the reins, then watched very puzzled as I ran up the gangway to the ship. “Now look ’ere!” he called to me. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“To the South Seas,” I said.
“Wal-ker!” he shouted. “What do I do with this?” He held up the reins; he gestured to the carriage.
“Keep it,” I said. “I’ve no need for it now.”
We cleared the Channel on a Sunday, and bore to the south in a fresh breeze. A day or two later, clear of the land, I realized that England had vanished behind us, and the sea was empty all around. The waves were big and blue and rolling, and their white caps sparkled in the sun. Boggis was
high in the foremast, and I at the wheel, and neither of us had looked back. We were both gazing ahead.
We would search for my father. I meant to look for as long as I could, and to carry him away if possible. I believed I was “doing the handsome thing.” I had faced my fears and overcome them. I had made the sea my home.
Mr. Goodfellow became a slaver by accident. He began, in my mind, only as a rich man, then became a merchant who owned ships. He lurked in my imagination for quite a while before it turned out that he transported convicts to Australia.
That was the start of it. I had to supply Mr. Goodfellow with a few ships for his business, and since I wanted them to be old and poorly maintained, I let him buy up the dregs of the slaving fleet.
Well, he got what he paid for: ships that were old and leaky, that still carried the lingering horror of their last cargos. But being Mr. Goodfellow, he didn’t waste any money, or spend any time, refitting his old slavers. He put them
straight into service as transports, not even bothering to remove the ringbolts where the slaves had been shackled down for the long voyage across the Atlantic. Signs of the ships’ histories lay everywhere: in the forgotten lengths of rusted chain; in the stench from the bilge.
From his office in London, Mr. Goodfellow sent off loads of convicts in his miserable ships. But what would he do, I wondered, for the voyage home? He could have followed the example of the earliest convict ships, and had his own vessels carry on to India or China, where they’d collect exotic cargos to be carried home around Cape Horn, in a voyage that would circle the world. Or he could have followed the path of the transport
Boyd
, and filled his ship with timber from New Zealand. But he wouldn’t have been too eager for that, as
Boyd
was attacked by Maori warriors, who killed the crew and burned the ship. Mr. Goodfellow was a man of small conscience, with ships made for slaving. His choice seemed natural; he became a slaver.
The Castaways
is historical fiction, not a collection of facts. But I don’t think it would be fair, or proper, to distort the whole history of slaving to make a story more dramatic. So the tale had to fit within the truth, rather than the other way around. Surprisingly, that wasn’t so easy to sort out.
When Tom Tin tells little King George that slaving is illegal, he is right. But at the same time, he’s wrong. In the time of this story, a British sea captain could be fined for carrying slaves; he could be put to death. But British landowners in the American colonies still owned slaves, and had every right to do so.
In Britain, the slave trade was outlawed in 1102, though a
sort of virtual slavery—in the feudal system—continued four hundred years, until the end of serfdom. But that didn’t prevent Britons from participating in the slave trade. In 1572, John Hawkins became the first—or one of the first—English sailors to buy slaves in Africa and sell them in the West Indies. It was illegal, because he was trading with Spanish colonies, but he made enough that others followed him. Hawkins, the man who brought potatoes and tobacco to England, also launched the English slave trade.
It flourished through the 1600s, as Britain developed colonies in America. Even the King got involved, in 1660, when Charles II chartered the slaving company Royal Adventurers into Africa.
In Britain and its colonies, Englishmen owned slaves. The well-to-do put them to work as personal servants. Among these was Charles Stuart, a representative of the English government in the colony of Virginia. In 1749, Stuart bought an African slave named Somerset. Twenty years later, when his work made him travel to England, Stuart took Somerset along.
In England, Somerset went to church and was christened James. He met members of a growing antislavery movement, and in 1791, he ran away. Charles Stuart put up a reward and recaptured his slave. He imprisoned James Somerset on a ship bound for Jamaica, where Somerset would be sold and put to work on a sugar plantation. But Somerset’s English godparents intervened, appealing to the courts for James Somerset to be freed. He was. The judge ruled that a slave could not be forced to leave England against his will. He did not say that slavery was illegal, or that Somerset was not a
slave. But slavery was now unlawful in England, though not in the colonies.
English merchants continued to traffic in slaves. In the last half of the eighteenth century, no nation surpassed them. But opposition grew, and in 1807 Parliament passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, making it an offense to transport slaves in British ships. A first step toward the end of slavery in the British Empire, it brought a tragic consequence. Faced with a fine of 100 pounds per slave, English captains began tossing their slaves overboard at the approach of a British warship. Twenty years later, the government increased the penalty. It said slaving was piracy, punishable by death.
So this is how it was at the time of Tom Tin. Throughout the Empire, in the colonies of the Americas, Britons still kept slaves. British seamen still carried slaves, but were pirates because of it. This is why Tom is both right and wrong in his opinion of slaving. It was fine to own people, just not to buy and sell them.
In 1833, Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act. It came into force the following year, granting emancipation to all slaves in the British Empire. For many, though, freedom didn’t amount to much right away. Instead of slaves, they became apprentices, indentured to their owners. They weren’t truly free for another five years, when Parliament paid a handsome compensation to the owners of plantations.
Mr. Goodfellow, of course, doesn’t collect his slaves in Africa, but in Borneo and its surrounding islands in the Pacific. But, otherwise, his slave-trading operation is typical of those of the time. He is only twisting a leg of the old
“Triangle Trade” that sent ships round the Atlantic, from England to Africa, to the West Indies, and home.
It was a terrible business, where cargos of people were insured like horses and it was better for a captain to throw his slaves alive to the sea than to carry them sick to harbor. This story doesn’t even touch on the awful truths of slavery. I hope it doesn’t seem to make light of them.