Trade Wind Read Online Free PDF Page B

and children who had been packed into the hot, dark, airless space as though they had been bales of cloth; crouching ankle deep in their own filth, unable to move and barely able to breathe, and chained together so that the starving, dying, tortured living were still manacled to the decomposing bodies of the fortunate dead.
    Apart from the crew there were three hundred captive negroes on the schooner, and of these eighteen were found to be dead, while a dozen more lay on the deck, huddled together at the foot of the foremast and dying of disease and starvation.
    “Bring ‘em up,” ordered Dan Larrimore, his voice as hard and expressionless as his rigid face. He stood back while they were drawn up through the small hatches to collapse on to the deck where some lay still and moaned, while others crawled feebly to the scuppers and licked the salt water with tongues that were blackened and swollen from thirst.
    More than half of the captives were children. Boys and girls whose ages ranged from eight to fourteen years, who had been captured by men of their own race to be sold into slavery for a handful of china beads or a cheap knife. Young and defenceless creatures who had committed no crime against humanity, but who represented a fat profit in counted coin, and whose hands were needed for planting, tending and picking the sugar-cane and cotton on rich plantations on the other side of the world. In Cuba and Brazil, the West Indies and the Southern States of America. “And we dare to call ourselves Christians!” thought Dan Larrimore bitterly. “We have the infernal impudence to send out missions to the heathen and preach sanctimonious sermons from our pulpits. And half Spain and Portugal and South America light candles to the saints and bum incense and go to Confession, and can hardly move for priests and churches and statues of the Virgin. It’s enough to make one vomit…”
    A dazed, emaciated negress stumbled towards the rail, holding in her arms the body of a child whose skull had been crushed, and seeing that the ugly wound was fresh and bleeding, Dan said sharply: “How did that happen?”
    The woman shook her head dumbly, and he repeated the question in her own tongue.
    “My son cried when your ship came near,” said the woman in a parched whisper, “and the overseer feared that you might hear and struck him with an iron bar.”
    She turned away from him, and leaning over the rail dropped the little body into the sea. And before he could stop her, or even realize what she was about, she climbed onto the rail and leapt in after it.
    Her head surfaced only once, and as it did so a black, triangular fin sliced through the water. There was a swirl and a splash and the sea was stained with something that would have been red by daylight but that by moonlight showed only as a spreading patch of oily darkness. Then the shark sank out of sight, and die woman with it. Presently other bodies were sent to join them as the dead were separated from the living and flung overboard, and the scavengers of the deep tore them in pieces and dragged them under, and the waves washed the sea clean again.
    The slaver’s boats were lowered and her hapless cargo—dazed, apathetic and convinced that they were merely falling from the clutches of one set of brutal captors into the hands of another and possibly worse one—were transferred to the Daffodil to the accompaniment of hysterical threats from their late owner.
    The schooner’s Captain stormed and raged, calling down curses upon the collective heads of the entire British Navy, and shouting that his name was Peter Fenner, and that he was an American citizen and Perfidious Albion would be made to pay dearly for having fired upon him. But his log had been written in Spanish, his flag lockers proved to contain the flags of a dozen different nations, and his papers gave his name as Pedro Fernandez and his “Country of residence’ as Cuba.
    “What do you propose to do with him?”