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Updated: May 14, 2025
Then all flung themselves upon their knees about him and sent up a chorus of ironical wailings, and mocking supplications, whilst they swabbed their eyes with their soiled and ragged sleeves and aprons "Be gracious to us, O sweet King!" "Trample not upon thy beseeching worms, O noble Majesty!" "Pity thy slaves, and comfort them with a royal kick!"
The ship she took her departure in sailed from its jetty in the river at six o'clock in the morning. Preparations for her comfort had been completed over night; indeed she slept on board, and Duff had only the duty and the sentiment of actual parting in the morning. He found her in a sequestered corner of the fresh swabbed quarter-deck.
She washed, scoured, flapped, swabbed, polished. By eight o'clock she had done the work that would ordinarily have taken until noon. The house was shining, orderly, and redolent of soapsuds. During all this time she had been listening, listening, with her sub-conscious ear. Listening for something she had refused to name definitely in her mind, but listening, just the same; waiting.
There were cakes with jelly, and cinnamon kuchen, and cunning cakes with almond slices nestling side by side. And there was freshly-baked bread twisted loaf, with poppy seed freckling its braid, and its sides glistening with the butter that had been liberally swabbed on it before it had been thrust into the oven. Fanny Brandeis gazed, hypnotized.
After we had finished, swabbed down, and coiled up the rigging, I sat down on the spars, waiting for seven bells, which was the sign for breakfast. The officer, seeing my lazy posture, ordered me to slush the main-mast, from the royal-mast-head, down.
Smallbones walked away, grinning with delight, but his face was turned from Mr Vanslyperken. The corporal returned, swabbed up the blood, and reported that the bleeding had stopped. Mr Vanslyperken had no further orders for him he wished to be left alone.
"Meanin'?" asked the other, as he mechanically swabbed the bar. "Meanin' that you an' Doc's goin' to help me do it. An' that hain't all. Tonight 'long 'bout dance time I want that saddle horse o' yourn an' yer sideways saddle, too. They's a gal o' mine come in on the train, which she'll be wantin', mebbe, to take a ride, an' hain't fetched no split-up clothes fer to straddle a real saddle.
"Ay," said Joe, "if he hadn't swabbed up too much liquor this morning, he wouldn't steer like that. Why, he will foul her!" As he spoke the Swab's bowsprit passed just inside one of the ropes of the other vessel, and was snapped off as if it had been a pipe-stem. "Sarves him right," growled Gunter. "It's a pity all the same," said Trevor.
However, he swabbed decks and did odd jobs without a grumble and he was swabbing the deck on the morning she came up; he dropped the business for a moment to take the two hands she held out to him. All through that time below she had been wanting Raft and his big hand to pull her through. Satisfied, knowing he was on board and all right, but wanting him all the same.
But on departure for the "middle passage," as the trip to America was called by reason of its being the second leg of the ship's triangular voyage in the trade, the slaves were kept below at night and in foul weather, and were allowed above only in daylight for food, air and exercise while the crew and some of the slaves cleaned the quarters and swabbed the floors with vinegar as a disinfectant.
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