This charming anticipation was felt even more strongly aboard, and when in answer to the Commodore’s signal the Ringle and many of the boats headed for the anchorage and their mother-ships, they were greeted with renewed and even stronger cheers. In a trice they would become liberty-boats, ready and willing to waft Jack ashore, and several members of the watch below hurried off to beautify themselves, whilst others less sure of their desserts, sought out their midshipmen or divisional officers to see what an earnest plea, a becoming deference, might do, and whether fourpence might be advanced.
It was while the talk of coming joys was at its height that a horrid rumour began to spread. First a sour-faced young bosun’s mate stumped into the gundeck, plucking his best Barcelona silk handkerchief from his neck. ‘No liberty,’ he told the world in general.
‘No shore-leave after sunset in Sierra Leone. Doctor’s fucking orders.’
They told him he was wrong- the rule applied to him alone, because of his ill-conduct: and splay feet: and dismal Jonah face. It was nonsense to say that there should be no liberty. But presently the news was repeated so often and by so many people that it could no longer be disbelieved. No shore-leave anywhere on the Coast after sunset: Doctor’s orders, confirmed by Captain and Commodore.
‘Damn the Doctor.’
‘Rot the Doctor.’
‘The Doctor’s soul to Hell,’ said the lower deck, the midshipmen’s berth, and the wardroom.
The Doctor himself, busy sewing up the radiant Whewell’s arm – slashed in a brief encounter and roughly bound up with a dead slaver’s shirt-tail – listened to his report, his informal verbal report to the Commodore. In consultation with the lieutenant, midshipmen and warrant-officers he had divided the flotilla into four groups of about equal strength, keeping shipmates together as much as possible, two for Sherbro and two for Manga and Loas, quite close on the mainland. ‘We were to go to the western market on Sherbro first, the leading boat to paddle in, the chief Krooman to hail quietly, asking was So-andSo in the way, the boat coming alongside as he talked, and the moment it touched we hurried aboard, instantly bundling the anchor-watch below, making the hatches fast and swearing they should be blown to Hell if they lifted a finger, cutting the cable and putting out to sea with as pretty a breeze as you could wish. It was as easy as kiss my hand’ – Whewell laughed aloud – ‘they had no guard, no notion of any possible danger, and they made no fuss. It was the same with the next three, all prime schooners –
we could hardly believe it – and so till we came to the ship. We were a little slow in getting aboard, for she was under way, with all hands on deck, and there was a little trouble – that is where I got this’ – nodding to his wound – ‘But it amounted to nothing; and having stripped Sherbro, west and east, we joined the others in the offing and proceeded to Manga and Loas, where we did much the same; though I am happy to say, sir, that there they fired on us.’
‘Very good,’ said Jack with satisfaction, for any vessel firing on a man-of-war, even if she were no larger than a four-oared cutter, was guilty of piracy and therefore forfeit, whatever its colours or nation: condemned without a word. ‘But no ill effect, I trust?’
‘Only a few flesh-wounds, sir: for as the first brig let fly, a Portuguese, the clouds parted and they was how many we were, prizes and all. One tried to cut and run, but that did him no good: the rest, those that were awake, pulled for the shore like smoke and oakum in what boats they had alongside or in tow. So having cleared those two places,
sir, we shut their people up below, put prize-crews aboard, and keeping them well under our lee in case of any foolish attempt, we shaped our course for home.’
‘Very well done, Mr Whewell, very well done indeed,’ said Jack: and after a pause,
‘Tell me, what did you do about their papers?’
‘Well, sir, I remembered what the Governor said about a legal quibble getting in the way of what was obviously right,and I think they were mostly destroyed in the battle or lost overboard. I did leave a couple of Portuguese captains’ manifests and registers alone, to look better: not that it made any odds, since the Portuguese are not protected north of the Line. The pirates I never troubled with, but clapped them in irons directly. And now I come to think of it, sir, there was someone in Government House, one of the gentlemen of the ViceAdmiralty Court, I believe, who observed that a man who had no papers, whose ship had no papers, and who could not certainly identify the person who arrested him was in a hopeless state: he could not make out any kind of a case at all, even with the best of counsel and even if some foolish legal clause was in his favour.’
‘That was your view, I believe, Doctor,’ said Jack.
‘There, Mr Whewell,’ said Stephen, cutting his thread and taking no notice of the indiscretion. ‘There. I should advise the holding of the limb in a sling for a few days, and the avoidance of anything like excess in meat or drink. A dish of eggs for dinner, or a small grilled fish, followed by a little fruit; and a small bowl of gruel before retiring, thin, but not too thin, will answer very well. And this will answer very well for a sling, too,’ he went on, his eye having been caught by Jack’s best superfine cambric neckcloth, draped over the back of a chair fresh from Killick’s iron. ‘There,’ he said, inserting the wounded arm with the ease of long practice. ‘Now let me ask you to recommend a reliable middle-aged Krooman, given neither to whimsies nor the drink, who will show me the way in Freetown, where I must go shortly after sunset. My dear Commodore, may I beg for a suitable conveyance?’
‘My dear Doctor,’ said Jack, ‘I shall allow you no such thing, nor will Captain Pullings or Mr Harding or anyone else that loves you. Was you to be seen going ashore within half an hour of forbidding the same indulgence to the entire ship’s company, you would be the most hated man in the squadron. I do not say they would offer much in the way of physicaJ violence, but their affection would be killed stone dead.’
‘If first thing in the morning would do, sir,’ said Whewell, ‘I have the very man, coming off with papers for me and Mr Adams to sign about the number of slaves released.
A Krooman elder by the name of – well, their own names being hard for us to pronounce, we often call them Harry Nimble, or Fatty, or Earl Howe. Mine is known up and down the coast as John Square. The very man for you.’
Square was seaman’s hyperbole, but only a pedant could have objected to Rectangular, for Whewell’s Krooman was a very broad-shouldered, deep-cheated man with short legs and long arms. His small round head was topped by greying wool and his face bore two blue lines on the forehead and another, broader, right across from ear to ear, but on him neither these nor his filed incisors looked any more bizarre than a ruffled shirt on a European. He was as black, or even blue-black, as a man could be, which gave his smile a more than usual brilliance; yet it was clear that he was not to be trifled with in any way.
He came at sunrise, paddling out in one of those flexible, apparently frail canoes that the Kroomen used for landing through the monstrous surf so usual along the coast, ran up the side as nimble as a boy, saluted the quarterdeck and called out ‘Papers for Lieutenant Whewell, sir, if you please,’ in a tremendous bass.
He was perfectly willing to take Stephen ashore and show him anything he wished to see in Freetown; and as they made the passage, rising and falling on the long, heavy swell, Stephen asked him whether he knew the inland parts, the wild country, and the animals that lived there. Yes, said he: in his childhood he had lived part of the time at Sino, in the Kroo country, on the coast, but he had an uncle who lived far up the river, and there he spent some years when he was old enough to hunt: his uncle had showed him all manner of creatures – which were lawful, which were holy or at least protected by ju-ju, which were unclean, which were improper for a young unmarried man of his condition; and this knowledge, delightful and necessary in itself, proved of the greatest value later, when he was engaged by a Dutch naturalist to show him the serpents of the region, an engagement that allowed him to buy his first wife, a brilliant dancer and a cook.