Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

onto.
    “ ‘Take hold! Clasp hands!’ a sailor called, as he leapt out holding the line, up to his waist in water. When the next swell had sucked back out to sea, we jumped and lifted our soaked skirts. In my small fists I clenched the hands and skirts of women on either side. When the next wave came they lifted me between them and kept running. I remember how one called, ‘ Fair amach dos na miola mora! Look out for the shark! Look out for the shark!’
    “Then there we were on the beach. But even then, while the men waited tied in a coffle ahead of us under a guard of seamen who pointed muskets and pistols, even then I looked away from our certain plight. Looked toward loveliness. For fanned around my feet—yellow and red and coral pink, pearliest white and the black of Vulcan glass—were tiny stones and curly shells which the clear water waved and winked at me like baubles …”
    “Thus came ye to the island of Barbados on February eighteenth, in the year of our Lord 1651,” overvoices Peter Coote. “And a long morning’s telling of it too. You give your history great importance, biddy. Return now to your mat. Dip the cloths I left you in the medicine and wrap them over your back; but take care to remove them before they stick to your weals, or you will rue it.”
    The woman stands, but does not thank him for his expertise. This sours his remaining bit of goodwill. He screws the lid onto the inkpot at an angle. “Lucy! Lucy!” he shouts. When the slave appears, far too soon to have been at her appointed tasks in the garden cooking shed, he orders, “Take the prisoner back to the sick-house, then fetch my lunch. I shall want lemon in the water when I bathe my hands, to get off this blasted ink.”

II
    W hen he was twenty-five Peter Coote came out from Oxford to make his fortune in the Indies, after investing the entire younger-son’s portion of his father’s holdings in an up-and-coming shipping concern with offices in Bristol. The company provided him with a post as ship’s surgeon for the passage to Barbados. That had been fifteen years ago, in 1669; a year when excessive rains hard on the heels of drought resulted in a scourge of epidemics among plantation workers. Coote had judged he was arriving at a most propitious moment, for while hundreds of lives were lost, hundreds more were saved through treatments like his own tonics and cuppings, purgings and lettings, and luck, of course, herself. The value of good medical men to plantation economics was thus established. Coote had been appointed Apothecary to Codrington and Cornwall—two of the largest holdings, with hundreds of acres in sugar and tens of thousands of pounds invested in primarily African bondsmen.
    But the thrifty managers of these plantations took great care that outside services were utilized with parsimony. Fifteen years had passed, Coote attaching himself to one owner, another manager, most recently an Anglican priest with a wealthy congregation; yet he barely eked along between the goodwill of them all. He still held no acreage of his own.
    Then at last year’s Christmas ball the Anglican—one Reverend Aynes—had introduced him to a weathered man in rose peau de soie and a lustrous brown wig.
    “Governor, may I present the finest young apothecary to come to us from London in many years? Presently he tends the slaves at Codrington, and … Colonel Stede, Doctor Coote.”
    To Aynes, Peter noticed, as to all the wealthy planters he had met, his own existence on the island seemed to begin at the moment he made their personal acquaintance. Peter held out his hand and bowed. His fingers were not taken, and he curled them back toward his chest in a graceful gesture. When he straightened he found the new Governor chewing a sweetmeat and gazing at him with wet black eyes.
    “… the latest in surgical techniques as well,” muttered the minister.
    “How do you regard your labors with these creatures, sir?” asked Colonel Stede, catching