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Updated: May 16, 2025
Billy was bleeding from a cut over the forehead which blinded him, and Lathrop had got two nasty knife thrusts, one in the arm and the other in the fleshy part of the calf of his leg, when they were suddenly attacked from the rear by half-a-dozen slavers. The next minute, wounded and bound, they were as helpless as two captured puppies.
The brig was just two months out from England, from whence she had been dispatched to the West African coast to form a portion of the slave-squadron and to relieve the old Garnet, which, from her phenomenal lack of speed, had proved utterly unsuitable for the service of chasing and capturing the nimble slavers who, despite all our precautions, were still pursuing their cruel and nefarious vocation with unparalleled audacity and success.
Hemming stood up and scanned the coast narrowly, thinking that after all the schooner might have been run on shore, and as slavers are but slightly put together, might have speedily been knocked to pieces.
The whole of the force on that station is employed either in cruizing after slavers, and assisting to put down the slave trade, or it is hovering about the shores of the Spanish Main and the Gulf of Mexico, for the protection of British foreign commerce, for redressing the wrongs to British subjects and interests in Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba, or Hayti, or for conveying foreign specie and bullion from those countries for the behoof of British merchants at home.
All sounds of conflict had now ceased, giving way to the exultant shouts and bass laughter of the victorious savages looting the property of the slavers. Not a man was left alive up there, Laurence knew only too well. He alone was spared, as the bearer of that mysterious sign; was spared, miraculously indeed but to what end?
She proved, however, to be a whaler, the Grand Turk, whose captain had come on board the Ajax off Raratonga. As Captain Bertram wished to make inquiries of Captain Judson respecting the slavers, he invited him on board. The captain of the whaler seemed very much out of spirits. Before he went away, Mr Martin had a long talk with him, and inquired what was the matter.
And then there is cruising in open boats, and exploring rivers, and fights with pirates or slavers; perhaps a skirmish with the dependents of some nigger potentate, and fifty other sorts of adventures, not to speak of prize-money and all that sort of thing, you know. Oh, to my mind, the coast of Africa is one of the best stations in the world, in spite of what is said against it."
Everybody toiled except the captain, who directed, and Robert saw that he had all the qualities to make him a leader of slavers or pirates. In extreme danger he was the boldest and most confident of them all, and he stood by his men. They could see that he would not desert them, that their fortune was his fortune. He was wounded, Robert did not yet know how badly, but he never yielded to his hurt.
It is, therefore, a positive absurdity to treat the captain and crew of a slave-ship in any milder way than the captain and crew of a pirate ship; and if a like measure of justice had been constantly served out to both, it is but natural to suppose that slavers would now have been as scarce as pirates are, if not a good deal scarcer.
These devices for keeping the man-market fully supplied had not at this time been invented, and the captains of the slavers, lying off a dangerous coast in the boiling heat of a tropical country, grew restive at the long delay. Perhaps some of the rum they had brought to trade for slaves inflamed their own blood.
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