And rows of coffee and oranges and cane and cocoa grew and ever spread out on the islands. There was some little trouble, of course, when the terms of indenture ran out. But the slums of London bred new slaves quickly enough, God knew! and the king was never without a fine supply of enemies.
England was becoming a sea power with her governors and palaces and clerks in the New World, and ships of manufactured things were sailing out of Liverpool and Bristol in ever increasing numbers.
I
With breaking day, Henry was in the outskirts of Cardiff, all his terror gone and a new blossoming wonder in him. For it was an unbelievable thing, this city of houses, rank on rank—no two of them exactly alike—the lines of them stretching out endlessly like an army in the mud. He had never considered such magnitude when people spoke of cities.
The shops were opening their shutters, putting their goods on display, and Henry stared wide-eyed into every one as he passed. Down a long street he went until he came at last to the docks with their fields of masts like growing wheat, and their clouds and cobwebs of brown rigging in an apparent frenzy of disorder. There was loading of bundles and barrels and slaughtered animals into some of the ships, and others were sending out of their curved bellies goods in queer foreign boxes and sacks of braided straw. A tremendous bustle of excitement lived about the docks. The boy felt that holiday tingle which. had come to him when men were putting up pavilions for a fair at home.
A loud song burst out of a ship just getting under weigh, and the words were clear, beautiful foreign words. The water slapping smooth hulls was a joy to him to the point of pain. He felt that he had come home again to a known, loved place, after days and nights of mad delirium. Now a great song of many voices came from the moving barque, and its brown anchor rose from the water; its sails dropped from the yards and caught the morning wind. The barque slid from its berth and moved softly down the channel.
Onward he walked to where the ships were careened, showing weeds and barnacles, gathered in many oceans, hanging to their shining sides. Here was the short, quick hammering of the calkers and the rasp of iron on wood, and brusque commands built up to roars by the speaking trumpets.
When the sun was well up, Henry began to feel hungry. He wandered slowly back to the town to find his breakfast, reluctant to leave the docks even for food. Now the crimps were coming out of their holes, and the sniffling gamblers who preyed on sailors. Here and there a disheveled, sleepy-eyed woman scurried homeward as though fearing to be caught by the sun. Seamen on shore leave rubbed their puffed eyes and looked into the sky for weather signs as they lounged against the walls, Henry wondered what these men had seen in the sailing days of their lives. He stepped aside for a line of carts and tumbrels leaded with boxes and bales for the ships, and immediately had to dodge another line coming away, loaded with goods from across the sea.
He came at last to a busy inn. “The Three Dogs” it was called, and there they were on the sign looking very like three startled dromedaries. Henry entered and found a large apartment crowded with people. Of a fat man in an apron he asked whether he could get breakfast.
“Have you money?” the host asked suspiciously.
Henry let the light fall on a gold piece in his hand, and, as he had made the sign of power, the apron was bowing and gently pulling him by the arm. Henry ordered his breakfast and stood looking around the inn.
There were a great many people in the room sitting at the long tables or leaning against the walls; some, even, were seated on the floor. A little serving girl went among them with a tray of liquors. Some were Italians from the ships of Genoa and Venice, come with rare woods and spices that had been carried overland on camel back from the Indian Ocean to Byzantium. Frenchmen were there from the wine boats of Bordeaux and Calais, with an occasional square-faced, blue-eyed Basque among them. Swedes and Danes and Finns were in from the whalers of the north ocean, dirty men who smelled of decaying blubber; and at some of the tables were cruel Dutchmen who made a business of carrying black slaves from Guinea to Brazil. Scattered among these foreign men were a few Cambrian farmers, looking frightened and self-conscious and alone. They had brought pigs and sheep from the country for victualing the ships, and now were bolting their food so that they might get home again before nightfall. These looked for security to three man o’ war’s men wearing the King’s uniform who talked together by the door.
Young Henry lost himself in the lovely clamor of the room. He was hearing new speech and seeing new sights: the earrings of the Genoese; the short knife-like swords of the Dutch; the colors of faces from beet red to wind-bitten brown. All day he might have stood there with no knowledge in him of the passing of time.
A big hand took his elbow, a hand gloved in calluses; and Henry looked down into the broad, guileless face of an Irish seaman.
“Will you be sitting here, young man, alongside of an honest sailor out of Cork named Tim?” As he spoke he squeezed violently against his neighbor, flinging him sideways and leaving a narrow space on the bench end for the boy. There are no men like the Irish for being brutally gentle. And Henry, as he took the seat, did not know that the sailor out of Cork bad seen his gold piece.
“Thank you,” he said. “And where is it that you go sailing?”
“Ah! any place that ships go I do be sailing,” replied Tim. “I’m an honest sailor out of Cork with no fault on me save never having the shine of a coin to my pocket. And I wonder, now, how I’m to be paying for the fine breakfast, and me with never a shine,” he said slowly and emphatically.
“Why, if you have no money, I’ll buy your breakfast—so you will be telling me of the sea and ships.”
I knew it was a gentleman you were,” Tim cried. “I knew it the minute my eyes landed on you soft like—And a small drink to be starting with?” He shouted for his drink without waiting for Henry’s consent, and when it came, raised the brown liquor to his eyes.
“Uisquebaugh, the Irish call it. That means water of life; and the English call it ‘Whiskey’—only water. Why! if water had the fine body and honest glow of this, it’s sailing I would give up and take to swimming!” He laughed uproariously and tipped the glass up.
“I’m going to the Indies,” Henry observed, with thought to bring him back to talking of the sea.
“The Indies? Why, so am I, tomorrow in the morning; and for Barbados with knives and sickles and dress goods for the plantations. It’s a good ship—a Bristol ship—but the master’s a hard man all stiff with religion out of the colony at Plymouth. Hell-file he roars at you and calls it prayer and repentance, but I’m thinking there’s joy in all the burning to him. We’ll all burn a good time if he has his way. I do not understand the religion of him; there’s never an Ave Mary about it, and so how can it be religion at all?”
“Do you think—do you think, perhaps—I could go in your ship with you?” Henry asked chokingly.
The lids drew down over the ingenuous eyes of Tim.
“If it was ten pound you had,” he said slowly, and then, seeing the sorrow on the boy’s face, “five, I mean—”
“I have something over four, now,” Henry broke in, with sadness.
“Well, and four might do it, too. You give me your four pound, and I’ll be talking with the master. It’s not a bad man when you get to be knowing him, only queer and religious. No, don’t be looking at me like that. You come along with me. I wouldn’t run off with the four pound of a boy that bought my breakfast at all.” His face bloomed with a great smile.
“Come,” he said; “let’s be drinking that you go with us in the Bristol Girl. Uisquebaugh for me and wine of Oporto for you!” Then breakfast arrived and they fell to eating. After a few mouthfuls Henry said:
“My name is Henry Morgan. What is your other name besides Tim?”
And the sailor laughed heartily.
“Why, if there was ever a name to me but Tim you might find it kicking around in a wheel rut at Cork. The father and mother of me did not wait to be telling me my name. But Tim was on me without giving. Tim is a kind of free name that you can just take and no one to mention it, like the little papers the Dissenters be leaving in the streets, and they scuttling off not to be seen with them. You can breathe Tim like the air, and no one to put hand on you.”