The Commodore, page 27
Orders could be heard on deck, and the patter of feet overhead as the signal-hoists were prepared: already the helm was hard over, and the ship was turning, turning, her motion gradually changing from roll to pitch as she headed for the land. 'Look at that infernal lubber,' cried Whewell, pointing at the Thames, two cables' length astern and in the Bellona's wake. Stephen could discern something flapping about among the sails, and a certain deviation either side of the line traced by the pennant-ship; but his seamanship could not name the crime committed, heinous though it must have been.
The rough-sheets came, but before reading them Whewell asked after Square and Stephen's journey up the Sinon river.
'Square was all that could possibly have been wished,' said Stephen. 'I am most grateful to you for the recommendation; and although my little expedition was pitifully short, I saw many wonders and I brought back a wealth of specimens.'
'I wonder whether you saw your potto. I remember you particularly wished to see the potto of those parts.'
'I saw one, sure; and an eminently gratifying sight he was. But I was unable to bring him home.'
'In that case I have one aboard the Cestos, if you would like her. But I am afraid she is only the Calabar kind, without a tail: an awantibo. A she-potto. I thought of you at once when I saw her in the market.'
'Nothing, nothing, would give me greater pleasure,' cried Stephen. 'I am infinitely obliged to you, dear Mr Whewell. A Calabar potto within two or three hours' sail, or even less with this beautiful sweet-scented breeze. What joy.'
The activities of the inshore squadron took up the hour or so before dinner, which Whewell ate with the Commodore, the Captain, the first lieutenant and a scrubbed, speechless midshipman: they took their coffee on the poop, supporting Stephen up the ladder; and by now a vast expanse of Africa was to be seen ahead, lagoons glittering along the coast, very tall palms just visible, and greenness, often very dark, stretching away inland until it merged with the indefinite horizon and the sky. The midshipman made his barely-audible blushing acknowledgments and vanished; the superior officers followed him after no more than a glass of brandy; and Whewell said 'There, on the far bank of the lagoon, about half way along, is Whydah. May I pass you the telescope?'
'If you please. So that is the great slave market: yet I see no port, no harbour.'
'No, sir. Whydah has nothing of that kind. Everything has to be landed or taken off through the frightful surf - see how it breaks! - then run up the beach and so ferried across the lagoon. The Mina, who do it all, have wonderful surf-boats; but even so things get lost.'
'Surely that is a very curious arrangement for a large commercial town?'
'Yes, sir: but there are precious few real ports all along the coast. And then again, Dahomey, that is to say, practically everything we are looking at, is an inland kingdom: their capital is right up-country. They know nothing about the sea and they dislike the coast; but they are a very warlike nation, perpetually raiding their neighbours to capture the slaves they exchange for European goods. So they use Whydah, which is more or less under their rule, as the nearest place, inconvenient though it is; and since they export thousands and thousands of negroes every year, it has grown to be a considerable place, with English, French and Portuguese quarters, and some Arabs and Yorubas.'
'I see a great deal of green among the houses.'
'Oranges and limes and lemons everywhere, sir, a delight after a long passage. I remember squeezing a score together into a bowl and quaffing it straight off, when first I was here. Things were not so cleverly arranged in those days, and there were some goods you had to carry all the way to Abomey, the king's great town, or in the hottest weather to Kana, his smaller place.'
'I do not think I have ever read a description of a great African town - I mean a negro town as opposed to a Moorish.'
'A very curious sight it is, sir. Abomey has a wall six miles round, twenty feet high, with six gates. There is the king's house, a vast great place, surprisingly high, and lined with skulls: skulls on the walls, skulls on posts, skulls everywhere; and jawbones. And then of course there are great numbers of ordinary Ewe houses - they all speak Ewe in those parts - made of mud with thatched roofs; and some what you might call palaces, a market-place of perhaps forty or fifty acres, and a huge spreading barracks.'
'How did the people use you?'
'The Dahomi are a fine, upstanding set of men, civil, though reserved; yet I had the impression that they looked down on me, which they did, of course, being so much taller: but I mean out of pride. Still, I do not remember that any of the men behaved in a way you could object to; and since I had brought a dozen chests of capital iron war-hats for his Amazons, the king ordered me to be given a gold fetiso weighing a good quarter of a pound.'
'Did you say his Amazons, Mr Whewell?'
'Why, yes, sir. The Dahomey Amazons.' And seeing that Stephen was in no way enlightened he went on, 'The most effective part of the king's army is made up of young females, sir, terribly bold and fierce. I never saw more than a thousand at a time, when some particular bands were marching past; but I was assured there were many more. It was for them that I brought the iron war-hats.'
'They are actually warriors, so? Not merely camp-followers?'
'Indeed they are, sir, and by all accounts quite terrible - fearless and terrible. They have the post of honour in battle, and attack first.'
'I am amazed.'
'So was I, sir, when a pack of I suppose female sergeants made me come into their hut and fit them with their war-hats. I was younger then, and not as ill-looking as I am now, and they used me shamefully. I blush for it yet.' He hung his head, regretting having begun the anecdote. Stephen said 'Your infinitely welcome potto, Mr Whewell, is she as strictly nocturnal as her cousin the Common Potto?'
'Sir, I have no notion at all. She was there in the market, curled up in a ball under some straw in the bottom of a fine brass wire cage, and when I asked what was there the old woman said "Potto". It would have been no satisfaction to anyone not to haggle a little, and I knocked off the equivalent of fourpence for no tail; but in the end she had a price that made her laugh with pleasure and she said I might have some little books and pictures into the bargain. She had been a Popish missionary's housekeeper, you see, and she was selling what he had left. Everything had gone except these books and papers and the potto, which the people of all the nations in Whydah, even the Hausas, suspected of being a Roman fetiso, which might offend the local spirits. I carried her aboard the Cestos and just before I turned in I saw her looking at me with eyes like saucers, but she did not seem to like the sight, and she shrank back into the straw almost at once, though I offered her a piece of banana. That is all I know of her, except that she would have been boiled tomorrow if she had not found a customer.'
'You would not have her with you, at all, in that elegant boat, dear Mr Whewell?'
'Oh no. Movement seems to distress her, and we had to beat into a heavy head-sea: but I did bring the drawings and the books.'
The books were an Elzevier Pomponius Mela De situ orbis, a breviary worn almost to destruction and a thick notebook filled at one end with equivalents in various African languages and at the other with personal reflexions and what appeared to be drafts of letters. The drawings were painstaking, inexpert representations of the potto in different attitudes, tailless, anxious.
'I am sorry to be disappointing,' said Whewell, 'but the squadron is running in at rather better than eight knots - there, over to starboard, you can see our brigs and schooner- and in a few minutes I must hurry ahead with orders. All ships and vessels are to fire a royal salute of twenty-one guns.'
'Why, for all love? This is not Oak-Apple Day or any other great occasion.'
'In order to impress Whydah and the King of Dahomey: and it can be justified as being the birthday of a member of the royal family - well, almost. Mr Adams ran right through the book and came up with the Duke of Habachtsthal, who was born today: a close cousin, I believe. Anyhow, royal enough for the purpose.'
That ill-omened name was never wholly remote from Stephen's thoughts, but today it had retreated farther than usual, and the sudden, wholly unexpected sound of it cast a singular damp upon his happiness.
Whewell set off for the Whydah road, leaving the drawings and other things by Stephen's side. Presently he took up the notebook, and turning to the back he at once came upon a smaller drawing of both the potto and a creature very like it that he took to be Lemur tardigradus, with the following text, apparently meant for a fellow-member of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost: In her manners she is for the most part gentle, except in the cold season, when her temper seemed wholly changed: and her Creator who made her so sensible to cold, to which she must often have been exposed even in her native forests, gave her her thick fur, which we rarely see in animals in these tropical climates: to me, who not only constantly fed her, but bathed her twice a week in water accommodated to the seasons, and whom she clearly distinguished from others, she was at all times grateful; but when I disturbed her in winter, she was usually indignant, and seemed to reproach me with the uneasiness which she felt, though no possible precaution had been omitted to keep her in a proper degree of warmth. At all times she was pleased with being stroked on the head, and frequently suffered me to touch her extremely sharp teeth; but her temper was always quick, and when she was unreasonably disturbed, she expressed a little resentment, by an obscure murmur, like that of a squirrel.
From half an hour after sunrise to half an hour before sunset, she slept without intermission, rolled up like a hedgehog; and, as soon as she awoke, she began to prepare herself for the labours of her approaching day, licking and dressing herself like a cat, an operation which the flexibility of her neck and limbs enabled her to perform very completely: she was then ready for a slight breakfast, after which she commonly took a short nap; but when she sun was quite set she recovered all her vivacity. A little before daybreak, when my early hours gave me frequent opportunities of observing her, she seemed to solicit my attention, and if I presented my finger to her, she licked or nibbled it with great gentleness, but eagerly took fruit when I offered it, though she seldom ate much at her morning repast; when the day brought back her night, her eyes lost their lustre and strength, and she composed herself for a slumber of ten or eleven hours.
The missionary's writing was difficult to make out, irregular and trembling, the hand of a very sick or aged man, and by the time Stephen had come to the bottom of the page, the Bellona, her consort and all the inshore vessels had formed a line of parallel with the shore, lying to on the declining breeze at little more than point-blank range of the immense crowds blackening the strand. He had heard the usual orders, the hoarse cry of Meares the master gunner and his mate, and he knew that a salute was to be fired. Yet nothing had prepared him for the prodigious bellowing uproar that followed the Bellona's first discharge. The people on the strand were equally surprised, or even more so, and several thousand fell flat, covering their heads.
The noise was not quite so great, nor the smoke-banks quite so dense, as they had been at Freetown, but the whole was more concentrated; and when Stephen could hear himself think again he felt that Jack Aubrey was probably right, and that the slave-trade as a whole had received a setback worth a thousand times the cost in powder (shot there was none). For the potto he was not greatly concerned. Creatures that lived within the zone of tropical storms, with the enormous thunder breaking just over their heads, could put up with anything the Royal Navy might be able to offer, particularly those that slept all day with their heads between their knees.
Certainly this was the case with the present potto. When Whewell and Square brought her aboard and carried her down to Maturin's little cabin on the orlop - he did not trust Jack not to talk loud and chuck her under the chin, which would not do until she was used to life aboard - he sat with her a great while by the light of a single purser's dip. At about sunset she came out, looking nervous to be sure, as any country potto might in new surroundings, but neither shattered nor terrified. She would have nothing to do with his proffered banana, still less with a finger, but she washed to some extent- a very beautiful little creature - and a little before he left he saw one of the far too many local cockroaches walk into her cage. Her immense eyes glowed with an uncommon fire: she paused, motionless until it was within reach, and then seized it with both hands. Yet for eating the animal, which she did with every appearance of appetite, she used but one, and that the left.
'Good night, dear potto,' he said, locking the door behind him. His way led him through the after-cockpit, the midshipmen's berth, at present filled with a dozen boys and young men, engaged in eating their supper, throwing pieces of biscuit and shouting at one another. They all leapt up at the sight of the Doctor - asked him how he did - said they were very happy to see him on his pins - but he must not overdo it, particularly so soon, and at his age - he must take care - with this blessed topgallant breeze off the land she was pitching into the swell like Leda's swan - and the two senior master's mates, Upex and Tyndall, insisted upon leading him up the ladder to the gundeck, each holding an elbow, so to the upper deck and thence to the quarterdeck, where he was considered safe and capable of walking aft, with the first lieutenant's help, as far as the cabin.
'Heavens, Stephen,' cried Jack, 'I thought you were asleep in the bed-place. I have been walking about on tiptoe and drinking my sherry in an undertone.'
'I was sifting with my potto, in the orlop,' said Stephen, 'she being a nocturnal creature. What amiable young fellows they are in the cockpit.'
'Certainly. They are settling down now, growing far less obnoxious; and there are one or two may become seamen, given fifty years or so. But what a feat, to creep up from the orlop in your state of health. I trust they gave you a hand?'
'Perhaps it was more a question of mutual support,' said Stephen. 'My strength is coming back hand over fist. Hand over fist.' He repeated the nautical phrase with a certain complacency.
Yet although he lied shamefully with one half of his mouth, the other spoke Gospel truth: day after day this beautiful wind blew nobly, carrying the squadron out of the accursed Bight under a press of sail, once to the extent of skyscrapers aboard the Thames after her signal make more sail had been three times repeated, the third repetition emphasized with a windward gun; and day after day Stephen grew brisker, more agile, and (like the potto) greedier.
Many of the sick from the inshore vessels were now aboard the Bellona and other ships of the squadron, most with fevers of one kind or another - tertians, double tertians, remittents and quartans for the most part, though there were three cases of the yellow jack - and very soon Dr Maturin was making at least his morning rounds, with Square in attendance to help him up on deck, where he would stand for half a glass or so, revelling with Jack, Tom and all hands present in the squadron's pace as the breeze came whistling in either over the starboard or the larboard bow, no longer a soldier's wind right aft as it had been the first day they sank the shore, but never heading them either, so that they beat steadily towards the Line, making legs a whole watch long.
'This has never been known in the memory of the oldest Guineaman,' said Mr Woodbine, the master, 'and there are some hands who say your potto has brought the ship good luck.'
A Marine officer on the quarterdeck added, 'My servant Joe Andrews tells me that many of the old African hands say there is nothing like a potto for luck: and, after all, there is a potto's field in the Bible, is there not?'
'Is it true,' Jack asked Stephen at supper, 'that Barker and Overly are on the mend?'
'It is, too,' said Stephen, who had sat with them for hours, first persuading their neighbours that the yellow fever was not infectious - they would not speak to the poor men else, nor breathe their breath, but remained turned utterly away - and
then assuring the patients themselves that they had a very fair chance if they held on with all their might and never gave way to despair. No one could possibly have had more authority in this instance, and although the third man, very far gone, died almost at once, Barker and Overly were likely to find another way to Heaven.
'Ah,' said Jack, nodding his head, 'that was a famous stroke, bringing your potto aboard.'
'Why, your soul to the Devil, Jack Aubrey, for a vile wicked pagan and an infamously superstitious dog, to be so weak,' cried Stephen, nettled for once.
'Oh, I beg pardon,' said Jack, blushing. 'I did not mean that at all. Not at all. I only meant it comforted the hands. I am sure your physic did them a power of good, too. I make no sort of doubt of it.'
Beating up, beating steadily up into winds mostly west of south, often changeable but never still - none of those wicked clock-cairns of the Gulf with its dense fever-bearing mists drifting off the shore - and by the time they raised St Thomas, a cloud-capped peak soaring above the horizon at seventy leagues in the south-south-east a half east, Stephen had put on a stone and his breeches would stay up without a pin.
'There is our salvation,' cried he, having been called from a peaceful sleep to view the peak in question.
'How do you mean, our salvation?' asked Jack suspiciously. He had often been led out of his way or had been attempted to be led out of his way by remote islands said to harbour a cousin of the phoenix, a very curious wren, or the loveless bowers of parthenogenetic lizards (this was in the Aegean), and he had no intention of landing Dr Maturin on St Thomas for another of his timeless rambles: a seaman's eye could already make out the particular cloud-formation of the longed-for south-east trades a great way off on the starboard bow.
'My dear Commodore, how can you be so strange? Is it not I that have been telling you this mortal week and more that I have barely a drachm of cinchona, of Jesuit's bark, left in the dispensary at all? Have not my fever-cases drunk it up day and night? Did not other ships borrow several Winchester quarts? Was not a whole carboy broke by a great oaf I shall not name? And is not St Thomas the island of the world for bark of the finest quality, guaranteed to clear the sick-berth out of hand? And not only bark, but the kindly fruits of the earth, whose lack is now becoming evident?'
