In the Sargasso Sea - Thomas A. Janvier (top books to read txt) 📗

he said smilingly, but men who played a reasonably

square game and who got big money mainly because they took big risks.

When I asked him what sort of risks, he answered: “Oh, pretty much all

sorts—sometimes your pocket and sometimes your neck,” and added that

to a man of spirit these risks made half the fun. And then he said

that for a man who did not care for that sort of thing it was better

to be contented with a safe place and low wages—and asked me how long

I expected to stay at Loango, and if I had a better job ahead, when my

work there was done.

 

At first he would shift the subject when I tried to make him talk

about the slave traffic. But one day—it was toward the end of our

second week out, and I was beginning to think from his constant

turning to it that perhaps he really might mean to offer me a berth on

the brig, and that his offer might be pretty well worth accepting—he

all of a sudden spoke out freely and of his own accord. It was true,

he said, that sometimes a few blacks were taken aboard by traders,

when no other stuff offered for barter, and were carried up to Mogador

and there sold for very high prices indeed—for there was a prejudice

against the business, and the naval vessels on the Coast tried so

persistently to stop it that the risk of capture was great and the

profit from a successful venture correspondingly large. But the

prejudice, he continued, was really not well-founded. Slavery, of

course, was a very bad thing; but there were degrees of badness in it,

and since it could not be broken up there was much to be said in favor

of any course that would make it less cruel. The blacks who were the

slaves of other blacks, or of Portuguese,—and it was only these that

the traders bought—were exposed to such barbarous treatment that it

was a charity to rescue them from it on almost any terms. Certainly it

was for their good, as they had to be in bondage somewhere, to deliver

them from such masters by carrying them away to Northern Africa: where

the slavery was of so mild and paternal a sort that cruelty almost was

unknown. And then he went on to tell me about the kindly relations

which he himself had seen existing between slaves and their masters in

those parts, both among Arabs and Moors.

 

This presentment of the case put so new a face on it that at first I

could not get my bearings; which I am the less ashamed to own up to

because, as I look at the matter now, I perceive how much trouble

Captain Luke took to win me for his own purposes—he being a

middle-aged man packed full of shrewd worldly wisdom, and I only a

fresh young fool.

 

My hesitation about making up an answer to him—for, while I was sure

that in the main point he was all wrong, I was caught for the moment

in his sophisms—made him fancy, I suppose, that he had convinced me;

and so was safe to go ahead in the way that he had intended, no doubt,

all along. At any rate, without stopping until my slow wits had a

chance to get pulled together, he put on a great show of friendly

frankness and said that he now knew me well enough to trust me, and so

would tell me openly that he himself engaged in the Mogador trade when

occasion offered; and that there was more money in it a dozen times

over than in all the other trade that he carried on in the

Golden Hind.

 

I confess that this avowal completely staggered me, and with a rush

brought back all the fears by which I had been so rattled on the first

day of our voyage. In a hazy way I perceived that the captain had been

playing a part with me, and that the others had been playing parts

too—for I could not hope that among men of that stripe such

friendliness should be natural—and what with my surprise, and the

fresh fright I was thrown into, I was struck fairly dumb.

 

But Captain Luke—likely enough deceived by his own hopes, as even

shrewd men will be sometimes—either did not notice the fluster I was

in, or thought to set matters all right with me in his own way; for

when he found that I remained silent he took up the talk himself

again, and went on to show in detail the profits of a single venture

with a live cargo—and his figures were certainly big enough to fire

the fancy of any man who was keen for money-getting and who was

willing to get his money by rotten ways. And then, when he had

finished with this part of the matter, he came out plumply with the

offer to give me a mate’s rating on board the brig if I would cast in

my fortunes with his. Of the theory of seamanship, he said, I already

knew more than he did himself; and so much more than either of his

mates that he would feel entirely at ease—as he could not with

them—in trusting the navigation of the brig in my hands. As to the

practical part of the work, that was a matter that with my quickness I

would pick up in no time; and my bigness and strength, he added, would

come in mighty handily when there was trouble among the crew, as

sometimes happened, and in keeping the blacks in order, and in the

little fights that now and then were necessary with folks on shore.

And then he came to the real kernel of the matter: which was that

Bowers did not like his work and was not fit for it, and was

threatening to leave the brig at the first port she made, and so a man

who could be trusted was badly needed to take his place.

 

When he had finished with it all I was dumber than ever; for I was in

a rage at him for making me such an offer, and at the same time saw

pretty clearly that if I refused it as plumply as he made it we

should come to such open enmity that I—being in his power

completely—would be in danger of my skin. And so I was glad when he

gave me a breathing spell, and the chance to think things over

quietly, by telling me that he would not hurry me for answer and that

I could take a day or two—or a week or two if I wanted it—in which

to make up my mind.

V

I GIVE CAPTAIN LUKE MY ANSWER

 

For the rest of that day, and for the two days following, Captain Luke

did not in any way refer to his offer; and as he showed himself more

than ever friendly, and talked away to me in his usual entertaining

fashion, my rage and fright began to go off a little—though at

bottom, of course, there was no change in my opinions, nor any doubt

as to my giving him a point-blank refusal when the issue should be

squarely raised.

 

All this time the brig was bowling along down the trades; and on the

third morning after I had the captain’s offer—we being then close

upon the thirty-fifth parallel of north latitude—Bowers called my

attention to the gulf-weed floating about us, and told me that we were

fairly on the outer edge of the Sargasso Sea. We should not get into

any thicker part of it, he said, as we should bear up to clear it; and

so we actually did, hauling away a good deal to the eastward when the

brig’s course was set that day at noon. But my interest in the matter

had been so checked—all my thought being given to finding some way

out of the pickle in which I found myself—that I paid little

attention to the patches of yellow weed on the water around us or to

the bits of wreckage that we saw now and then; and when Bowers,

keeping on with his talk, fell to chaffing me about my desire to make

a voyage of discovery into the thick part of this floating mystery I

did not rise to his joking, nor did I make him much of a reply.

 

Indeed, I was in rather a low way that day; which was due in part to

my not being able, for all my thinking, to see any sort of a clear

course before me; and in part to the fact that the weather was

thickening and that my spirits were dulled a good deal by what we call

the heaviness of the air. All around the horizon steel-gray clouds

were rising, and a soft sort of a haze hung about us and took the life

out of the sunshine, and the wind fell away until there was almost

nothing of it, and that little fitful—while with the dying out of it

the sea began to stir slowly with a long oily swell. Far down to the

southeast a line of smoke hung along the horizon, coming from the

funnel of some steamer out of sight over the ocean’s curve, and the

heaviness of the atmosphere was shown by the way that this smoke held

close to the surface of the sea.

 

That Captain Luke did not like the look of things was plain enough

from his sharp glances about him and from his frequent examinations

of the glass; and he seemed to be all the more bothered—his seaman’s

instinct that a storm was brewing being at odds with the barometer’s

prophecy—by the fact that the mercury showed a marked tendency to

rise. Had he known as much of the scientific side of navigation as he

knew of the practical side he could have reconciled the conduct of the

barometer with his own convictions, and so would have been easier in

his mind; for it is a fact that the mercury often rises suddenly on

the front edge of a storm—that is to say, a little in advance of

it—by reason of the air banking up there. But having only his

rule-of-thumb knowledge to apply in the premises, the apparent

scientific contradiction of his own practical notions as to what was

going to happen confused him and made him irritable—the

nerve-stirring state of the atmosphere no doubt having also a share in

the matter—as was made plain by his sharp quick motions, and by the

way in which on the smallest provocation he fell to swearing at the

men. And so the day wore itself out to nightfall: with the steel-gray

clouds lifting steadily from the horizon toward the zenith, and with

the swell of the weed-spattered sea slowly rising, and with a doubting

uneasiness among all of us that found its most marked expression in

Captain Luke’s increasingly savage mood.

 

Our supper was a glowering one. The captain had little to say, and

that little of a sharp sort, while the mate only rumbled out a curse

now and then at the boy who served us; and I myself was in a bitter

bad humor as I thought how hard it was on me to be shut up at sea in

such vile company, and how I had only myself to blame for getting into

it—and found my case all the harder because of my nervous uneasiness

due to the coming storm. As to the storm, there no longer could be

doubt about it, for the barometer had got into line with Captain

Luke’s convictions and was falling fast.

 

When the supper was over the captain brought out his