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The Redemptioner
by
“Come, Sanford; you may go too,” said the planter to his son. “We’ll carry the fowling piece: there’ll be ducks on the water.”
SCENE II.
The time is the same day, and the place the deck of the Nancy Jane, at anchor. The captain is giving orders to the cook: “I want a good bowl of bumbo set here on deck against the planters come aboard.” Then turning to the mate: “Have the decks squeegeed clean, an’ everything shipshape. Put the rogues in as good garb as you can. You’ll find a few wigs in a box in my cabin. But these on the likeliest, and make ’em say they’re mechanics, or merchants’ clerks, and housemaids. Tell ’em if they don’t put out a good foot and get off our hands soon we’ll tie ’em up and make ’em understand that it’s better to lie to a planter than to stick on shipboard too long. Make the women clean themselves up and look tidy like ancient housemaids, and don’t allow any nonsense. Tell ’em if they swear or quarrel while the planters are aboard they’ll get a cat-o’-nine-tails well laid on. We’ve got to make ’em more afraid of the ship than they are of the plantations.”
The convicts were in the course of an hour or two ranged up against the bulwarks forward, and they were with much effort sufficiently browbeaten to bring them into some kind of order.
“They’re a sorry lot of Newgate birds,” said the captain to the mate. “I’m afraid we’ll have a time of it before we change ’em off for merchantable tobacco. Here, you Cappy,” he said to one of the older convicts. “Look here! Don’t you tell anybody to-day that you’re a seaman. They’ll swear you are a pirate, and that you’ll be off with one of their country sloops, and go a-blackbearding it down the coast. You’re to be a schoolmaster to-day.”
“I can’t read much, and I can’t hardly write a word,” said the man, a burly fellow of about sixty, whose heavy jaws and low brows would look brutal in spite of the brand-new periwig put on him that very morning to make him salable.
“That don’t matter,” said the captain. “You’re schoolmaster enough for a tobacco country. You can navigate a ship by the sun and compass, and that’s education enough. If you go and let it out that you’re a sailor, I’ll–well, you’ve been a captain or mate, and you know devilish well what I’ll do with you. I’ll serve you as you have served many a poor devil in your time.”
Then, catching sound of a quarrel between two of the women, the captain called the mate, and said: “Give both of the wenches a touch off with your rope’s end. Don’t black their eyes or hit ’em about the face, but let ’em just taste the knot once over the shoulders to keep ’em peaceable. Be in haste, or they’ll scratch one another’s eyes.”
The mate proceeded to salute the two women with a sharp blow apiece of the knotted rope, and thus changed their rising fury into sullenness.
Planters came and went during the forenoon, and cross-questioned the convicts, threatening to make it hard for them if they did not tell the truth. The visitors drank the captain’s bumbo, but the convicts were slow of sale. Some of the planters announced their intention not to buy any more convicts, meaning for the future to purchase only freewillers, or bond servants voluntarily selling themselves, and some had made up their minds not to buy any more Christian servants at all, but to stock their places with blacks.
It was mid-afternoon when Sanford Browne arrived in his dugout, propelled against a head wind and heavy seas by Bob, the white redemptioner, and Jocko, the negro boy. The planter himself sat astern steering, with little Sanford crouched between his knees. Leaving the two servants in the canoe, the planter and his son went aboard the ship, while the convicts crowded against the guard rail to get a look at the naked figure of Jocko, his black skin being a novel sight to their English eyes.