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John began to speak, but the man interrupted him.
‘And you’re as well to look at it, lad. Because without that, everything is nothing.’ He spat on the ground. ‘We’re at war.’
John looked again at the carcasses in the cages. ‘The French?’ he asked. ‘Were they in league with the French?’
‘Bugger the French. We’re at war with them.’ He sucked on his pipe again. ‘You’ll see if I’m not right,’ he said.
Months after his arrival, a letter reached John via Mr Paterson’s business. The letter had been weeks on board a ship crossing the Atlantic. It was written in his father’s hand. He opened it eagerly, forgetting how much time must have passed since its composition. It was very brief, a few lines only:
27 November 1746
Dear John,
Today I got notice that I am to be executed tomorrow.
The paper swam before his vision, his heart doubled its pace. With an effort he focused on the writing again.
I was proved reviewed by the Prince at Edinburgh with a small sword and pair of pistols when you know I was not in arms there, the injustice and untruth of which with a great many other things I designed to have expatiated more fully upon if I had time. I hear that while you stayed here you parted too easily from your money which will not do, I need not tell you to take care and please Mr Paterson.
Damn Mr Paterson! Mr Paterson was in London! He, John Wedderburn, was stuck in the Indies, and all his father could do – had been able to do – was complain about untruths and tell him to curb his spending. Take care. Take care of what, his empty purse? His browning skin? O God, Papa was dead! What had they done to him? They had wiped him clean away. As if to emphasise that awful fact, the letter was not even signed.
He tried to persuade himself that there might have been a reprieve, but he knew it could not be. A week, a month passed: no joyous, God-praising letter in the same hand arrived. Instead, in January, came his brother James to confirm the news.
The boys spent a week getting drunk together, which would not have pleased Mr Paterson if he had got to hear, but he did not, since Mr Paterson’s representatives were often to be found joining in the sessions. When they were on their own, the brothers tried to make sense of what had happened, where and who they now were.
‘Are you the sixth Baronet of Blackness, then?’ James wanted to know. ‘Now that Papa is dead.’
‘I don’t see how I can be. We lost Blackness years ago. We’ve even lost the farm at Newtyle.’
‘But Papa kept the title, did he not?’
‘I think it will be taken anyway, James, on account of our being out. At the moment I don’t care, I don’t feel like a baronet.’
James looked angry. ‘Well, if you don’t want the title I’ll have it. You dishonour Papa talking like that. He was strong right to the end.’
Then James told John of their father’s last night alive. To pre-empt last-minute applications for mercy it had been intended to keep the date of execution a secret from those about to die. On the evening of 27 November, James had been allowed in to see him. Sir John had been in the middle of a game of backgammon, and James had sat down beside him to watch. A few minutes later, a jailer had approached and whispered something in the father’s ear. Sir John had paused, his finger resting on one of the stones, as if contemplating what move to make. ‘Friend,’ he had said to the jailer, ‘would you kindly stand out of the light till I finish this game?’ Then, having played it out, he had put his arm around James and called for wine. When the men around him all had glasses, he told them the news: ‘I regret to tell you that I am to be executed tomorrow. There is no time for an appeal. I therefore ask you to join me in a farewell toast and then to indulge me with some solitude. My son is here, and I have letters to write.’
After the wine was drunk, he and James were given space alone. Sir John wrote half a dozen brief letters: one to his wife; one to John in Jamaica; three to relatives in Scotland entreating them to look after his family; and one to His Royal Highness, Prince Charles Edward Stewart.
‘He showed me that one,’ James said. ‘He wanted me to see that he remained loyal even after what had happened. He said we were all poor and he hoped the Prince would protect us. He sealed it up and gave it to me with the others, to give to Mr Paterson.’
‘Will the Prince protect us?’ John asked.
‘Of course he won’t. How can he? He’s away to France and he’ll not be back. I doubt Papa expected much from that quarter. The point is, though, he never wavered. And we must never waver. If we do, we will vanish.’
As Papa had vanished, John thought, but he said nothing. Perhaps James also felt the irony of his own remark. In the prison, even at that late stage, he had tried to persuade their father to do something to save himself. Ever since the sentence there had been a steady flow of visitors at night, including assorted vendors of ale and port, barbers, tailors and whores, all of whom anticipated doing some kind of business. Men condemned to death, after all, might as well spend what money they had left, either to look their best before the gallows crowd, catch the pox or drink themselves into oblivion. James had proposed that they pay one of the whores to lose some of her clothes – on a permanent basis – and get his father out in them. Sir John had dismissed this scheme: ‘Do you know how many hairy big-boned women are stopped leaving prisons on occasions like this, James? I do not wish to be discovered in such circumstances and ill-used on my last night on earth. I’m as well dying now as twenty years hence.’ Then he had blessed the boy, embraced him and sent him away. ‘Do not come here tomorrow. There will be nothing more to say. You will only make it harder for me to die.’
‘And did you obey him?’ John asked.
‘Aye. I did not see him at the prison again.’ James closed his eyes. He was shaking. John put his hand on his brother’s arm. James opened his eyes again. ‘I saw him later,’ he said. ‘At Kennington.’
But it would be a long time before he would say what he had seen there.
John had finally adjusted to the climate. James appeared to need no seasoning. His energy and curiosity were astonishing. Kingston veterans marvelled at him. He had a hundred schemes to make the best of their situation: to make money, lots of it; to work hard and live hard; and one day, to go back to Scotland.
John concurred with all of these propositions, especially the last one. He was more cautious, less certain that they would succeed, but he would put his back to the wheel and make it turn. His father’s reproach about the money rankled: it would rankle for twenty years. The last thing he had thought to say to him: you parted too easily from your money which will not do. Very well then: he would amass wealth. He would not squander it. He would not be the prodigal son. He would be the 6th Baronet. He would go home to enjoy his own again.
He was not the only one thinking along these lines. The island was something of a Jacobite refuge. Every boat, from America or Europe, disgorged another young or middle-aged man who found it expedient to sojourn in the sun for a few years. Some only lasted a few weeks: the sun was no friendlier than Butcher Cumberland. Those who ignored the dire warnings of old hands about the wrong food and drink, yellow fever and mosquitoes, the importance of clean water and the dangers of dirty cuts and grazes, dropped by the dozen. But the Wedderburns survived, working for one or other of Mr Paterson’s enterprises – he had stores in Kingston, and his agents acted on behalf of a number of plantations across the island. Another Jacobite exile and one of their old Perthshire friends, George Kinloch, had been made overseer of a small plantation in the west, near the port of Savanna-la-Mar. They were pleased for George, and when they went to visit him they liked what they saw of that end of the island. ‘There are opportunities here,’ James said. ‘There are great opportunities.’
One afternoon, John found his brother downing rum in a Kingston grog shop with two men of very different physical appearance. One was yet another Scot, not much older, black-haired, clean-shaven, neatly dressed. In his white linen shirt and light, black short coat he seemed to be coping well with the heat. His whole air was one of self-assurance. This was David Fyfe, a medical graduate of Edinburgh who had been in Jamaica eight months. The other man was huge, sixtyish, bulb-nosed and florid. A once white, now tobacco-yellow peruke, in a style that might have been fashionable under Queen Anne, was crammed on his wrinkled forehead, and this, together with the combined weight of a thick brown coat and ornately brocaded waistcoat, was causing him to sweat like a fountain.
James shouted John over and called for another chair, another glass and another bottle of rum. It was both hard and easy to believe he was still only sixteen.
‘Davie, James,’ John greeted them, taking the seat.
‘This,’ said James to the fat man, ‘is my esteemed elder brother John Wedderburn, late of Scotland, now a colonist like the rest of us. John, it is my pleasure and so forth to introduce Mr Thomas Underwood of – where did you say again?’
‘Amity Plantation, sir, in the parish of Westmoreland, county of Cornwall. My pleasure, sir, and an honour. Always an honour to meet another Scotchman. Not that it’s difficult here. You’re almost as numerous as the negers. No offence, naturally.’
He spoke with a mild Yorkshire accent, the words interspersed with heavy rasping breaths and much wiping of the brow. His unsuitable dress, clearly the chief source of his discomfort, seemed to indicate a newcomer. In fact Mr Underwood had been on the island nearly thirty years, but would never get used to the heat. He had small eyes made smaller by the encroaching folds of his cheeks. He tipped his fleshy head at John.
‘Now, sir, it’s all one to me, I assure you, but were you out?’
John had an idea that Mr Underwood, through James, already knew the answer. He drew himself up proudly: ‘That, sir, is not a question one gentleman expects to be asked by another.’
Underwood shrugged. ‘I’ll take that as an aye. No, no, don’t be offended, Mr Wedderburn, I don’t care a bit, and you’ll find very few folk as do. We’re an island of tolerance – we’re only here to get rich after all, and you can’t hold that against nobody. I only ask on account of you Scotchmen are such a curious breed. You’ll murder each other over crowns and creeds at home, but here the loyalest of you falls on his rebel compatriot like a brother. The sun does something to you it don’t do to Englishmen: it seems to dry up all your grudges.’
‘Mr Underwood’s plantation,’ James said, ‘is not far from where George Kinloch is. Mr Underwood knows George quite well.’
‘Indeed I do,’ Underwood said. ‘Not a grudge on that gentleman’s person.’
‘And what brings you to Kingston, sir?’ John asked.
‘A scramble, sir,’ Underwood said. ‘Tomorrow morning. I’m hoping to pick up some cheap slaves to replace half a dozen I lost at Christmas to the flux.’
‘But there’s a regular market at Savanna-la-Mar,’ John said. ‘Surely it’s a long and hazardous trip to come all this way for slaves?’
‘Oh, dreadful hazardous,’ Underwood agreed with enthusiasm. ‘A hundred miles and more on roads that would shake the teeth out of many men – not that you can call them roads, in some parts. But I’ve been visiting friends here, you see, and they’ve given me some fine heavy bits of furniture which I intend to ship home along with the new slaves, if I can get some. Are you in the market for slaves yourself, Mr Wedderburn?’ he asked John.
‘Not yet,’ said John.
‘But we will be,’ said James.
‘You should come along with me in the morning. I can show you what to look out for when you’re buying them up cheap. In a scramble, I mean.’
‘What,’ says James, ‘is a scramble?’
‘Just what it sounds like. The shipmasters have sorted their negers out by the time they get here, they’ve decided which ones they can sell at premium, which ones are ailing, which ones are feeble-minded, that kind of thing. They sell the best to folk as know what they want and have money to pay for it, they auction the weakest for whatever they can get, which is precious little, and them that’s left, the middling sort you might say, are put to a scramble. A set price is fixed beforehand, same for each slave, so if you’ve a good eye you can pick up an excellent bargain. Oh, but you have to be quick on your feet to beat t’others. Come along with me in the morning and I’ll show you how it’s done.’
‘We’ll be there,’ James said at once. ‘How about yourself, Davie?’
‘No, I’ll be seeing enough Negroes as it is. I’ve a long day tomorrow. Three plantations and a hundred and fifty slaves to inspect.’
‘Ill?’ Underwood said. ‘Not a contagion, I hope?’
‘No, a routine visit. A stitch in time, you’ll understand, or more likely a poultice or an incision, may save nine. Nine slaves, that is,’ he explained to the Wedderburns, ‘for which a master may have paid a great deal of money.’
‘How’s your master, Davie?’ John asked. ‘Still alive?’
‘Very sickly,’ said Davie Fyfe with a wide grin.
‘Excellent,’ said James. ‘You’ll be a rich man soon.’
‘What d’you mean?’ Underwood asked.
‘The surgeon Davie works for,’ James said, ‘has been ill for months. If he doesn’t want to expire here he’ll have to go back to England.’
‘In which case he’ll be dead before the Azores,’ Fyfe said.
‘So whatever happens,’ James said, ‘Davie will inherit the business, and probably at a knockdown price, won’t you, Davie?’
‘I’m hoping so. If you can stay fit yourself, there’s a fortune to be made here from doctoring.’
‘Oh, you needn’t tell me that, sir,’ said Underwood. ‘The bills I pay for doctoring! They would keep a lord and his castle back in England! I’m not complaining, mind you – if you get a surgeon in quick, he can save you far more in slaves than what he’ll charge you for his time. He can spot a fever before it turns into a forest fire, the flux before it becomes a flood, if you understand me. Negers go down in parties, Mr Wedderburn. One gets a fever, they all get it. But a good surgeon – and I’ll say this, a good surgeon’s nearly always a Scotch surgeon, begging your master’s pardon, Mr Fyfe – a good surgeon will nip that fever in the bud, and kill it. He might in the process kill the slave as has it, which is a loss to be borne of course, but I warrant you, it makes t’others get better quick. Am I right, sir?’
Davie Fyfe acknowledged that he was quite right. ‘Except,’ he added, ‘that a good surgeon never kills his patient, though the patient might unavoidably die of the attempt to make him well.’
‘A slip of the tongue, sir,’ said Underwood, slipping his own round another shot of rum. ‘And of course it depends on the illness. And the slave. There’s some negers can withstand any amount of fever, but will go down in a day with the yaws. There’s other negers live with the yaws like it’s their mother, but give them a touch of fever, they’re dead before morning. Am I right, Mr Fyfe?’
‘Quite right.’
‘I have seen the yaws,’ said James. ‘What causes it?’
‘Seen it?’ Underwood exploded. ‘I should think you have! You can’t be very long here without seeing the yaws! Oh, but you don’t want to know about it, young man. Do he, Mr Fyfe? Very nasty, very nasty. But you have to know about it, to know Negroes. Mr Fyfe will tell you about the yaws. Makes me shudder just to think on it.’
Davie Fyfe opened his mouth to explain the yaws, but Underwood had hit on a favourite theme, and rolled on unstoppably.
‘I take a great pride,’ he said, ‘in knowing my Negroes. I’m a fair man, and I don’t believe in mistreating them. Punishment, yes, but that’s not mistreating them if they deserve it, that’s treating them same as you’d treat anything in your charge, black, white or beast of the field. There’s men I know,’ he went on, shaking his head and in the process showering the table with sweat, ‘as have no respect for your African at all. They forget that he’s a human being. A bad planter don’t break them in as he should, he don’t season them over a twelvemonth, he puts them out in the field far too early, and then he wonders why they die on him and he’s wasted his money. That’s almost like murder, in my book. You can pay a terrible price for a fine Coromantee, a terrible price, but if you don’t look after him, well, you may as well have put your money on a horse with three legs. No, a good planter, such as I believe I am, knows his Negroes, and if you, Mr Wedderburn, and your young brother here, are to flourish in Jamaica, I’d advise you to know your Negroes too. Come along to the scramble with me tomorrow, and you can make a start. Truth of the matter is, you can’t prosper here without keeping slaves, and if you want to keep them you have to understand them, the different types of them. Do you follow me?’
‘You must tell us more, sir,’ James said, signalling for more rum and winking at John. ‘How many types of them are there?’
‘Oh, limitless, limitless,’ said Underwood. ‘Guinea, you see, where they come from, is bigger than, oh, England and Scotland and France put together. Far bigger. And what is Guinea? Is it a great kingdom, like France, like England? A fine country like your Scotland, sirs? No, it’s a jumble of little kingdoms and tribes and desert and swamp and forest, all mixed up together. That’s where your neger comes from, and there’s many of them very glad to get out of it, though they don’t think so at the time they’re taken, which is understandable. But if they stayed, chances are they’d be eaten by savage lions, or by other negers, or they’d be killed by them, or they’d starve, or die of thirst – there’s a hundred ways of dying in Guinea, Mr Wedderburn, and none of them’s nice. Or they’d be made slaves of by the Moors, which you may be sure is a sight worse than being a slave here in the Indies. A great deal worse. Am I right, Mr Fyfe?’
Mr Fyfe opined that he might well be, but as he had never been to Guinea he could not tell.
‘Nor I,’ said Underwood, ‘but there’s plenty as has. All the captains of the slave ships, they have, and I talk to them as part of my policy of knowing my Negroes. Anyway, as to types, Mr Wedderburn, there’s your creoles of course, to begin with – that’s them that’s born here in the Indies and has forgotten whatever African tribe they once was. Then, of the Africans, the full-blooded freshly imported slaves, well, I’d say there’s four types, speaking in a general kind of way. First, there’s your Eboes. They come mostly from Benin, that’s the underbelly part of Guinea. They’re the least useful, in my opinion, though they fetch them over in droves. A very timid type, and rather prone to killing themselves of despair, I’m sorry to say. You’ll see a lot of them in the scramble tomorrow, I don’t doubt. Then there’s your Pawpaws and your Nagoes, from a bit further north. Now these are very excellent Negroes if they’ll live, very docile and well-disposed creatures, and never the least trouble, but they die off easy from a lack of character – am I going too fast, sir?’ He asked this of James, who had produced a pocket book and stub of blacklead pencil and was taking rapid notes. James waved him on. ‘The third type is your Mandingo. He’s a clever fellow, too clever in fact, he can learn to read and write and do his sums very quick, but he’s lazy, and much given to theft. And then,’ said the fat planter grandly, as if announcing a prize bull, ‘there’s your Coromantee, from the Gold Coast. He’s the cream of Africans, stands head and shoulders above the rest. Firm of body, firm of mind, brave, strong, extraordinary powerful worker in the field – but proud too, stubborn, and ferocious when roused. You have to watch Coromantees like a hawk, gentlemen, but you’ll get more work out of one of them in a week than you’ll get out of six Eboes. Am I not correct, Mr Fyfe?’ he finished, by way of variation.
‘Indeed you are, sir,’ said Davie Fyfe, ‘and to what you’ve said I’ll add that, being of a strong constitution, they don’t get so sick as the others.’
‘We should have some Coromantees then,’ said James to his brother, ‘when we are planters. They sound like the negers for us.’
‘And how,’ said John, ‘do you intend that we pay for them?’
James did not answer that question then. Nor did he address it the following day, when they went to the scramble with Underwood and saw him in action picking up bargains. A large wooden pen had been filled with a couple of hundred Africans. Once a set price had been agreed, a drum sounded, the gates were opened and in rushed the planters or their overseers, each carrying a coil of rope identified by a couple of handkerchiefs tied to it.
Underwood, sweat lashing off him and his wig toppling on his head like a skein of yellow knitting, moved with amazing speed, grabbing at the arms of terrified Africans, quickly inserting a thumb into some of their mouths to check the state of their teeth, slipping his hand between their buttocks (it was known for ships’ surgeons to stop slaves’ anuses with oakum, to disguise the fact that they had the flux), pummelling and punching at their legs to test them for strength, and all the while playing out the rope, the loose end of which James had offered to hold.
‘Bring it round, sir, enclose them, that one, that one there, sir, the big bullish one,’ Underwood roared, making himself heard above a similar racket issuing from the mouth of every other white man in the scrum. James darted after Underwood like an elf behind an ogre. Every few seconds he turned back to John, who was following at a distance and doing his best to avoid bodily contact with anyone. There was an appalled look in James’s eyes, but he was also laughing uproariously. He began to wave the rope-end in black faces, and when they cowered or shied away his laugh got louder. It was as if, having decided to do something distasteful, he discovered that he quite enjoyed it.
In less than a quarter of an hour, Underwood had got himself seven new slaves, corralled by the rope like unwilling participants in some grotesque parlour game, and was settling up with the slave-ship captains.
That evening, long after Underwood had loaded his new purchases on board ship for Westmoreland, the brothers discussed the scramble over supper in their lodgings.
‘It was disgusting,’ John said.
‘You mean it offended you?’ James asked. ‘Your moral sensibilities?’
‘No, I mean it disgusted me. The noise and sweat and brutishness of it.’
‘It was impressive, too, though,’ James said. ‘Not Underwood – he’s a buffoon. But the fact that a man like that has such power over others.’
‘He certainly had no compunction about checking his wares.’ John had an image of the fat planter’s fingers running over black skin.
‘You’ll have to do the same,’ James said, ‘so you’d better get used to it. And you will. It doesn’t have to be so uncivilised.’ A sly look came over his face and he leaned forward. ‘Listen, John, here’s what I propose. We’ll be planters, and we’ll be better than the likes of Underwood, far better. But first we’ll be surgeons. I’ve been thinking about it all day. Davie’ll teach us, he’ll take us on as apprentices when he gets the business, he’ll not have to pay us much, not till we learn a little anyway. Well, you needn’t look so gloomy, you must have seen a fair display of wounds, quite a pack of sick men, in the last year or two.’
‘It’s true. But all those black bodies crushed together. It unnerved me.’
‘Well, treating them’s only common sense, surely, and luck, and having a strong belly. After what you’ve been through it’ll be bairn’s play; and if you can manage it, I can. And we’ll use our fees to buy slaves. We’ll do it right, though, not like that madness this forenoon. We’ll go direct to the slave ships, and buy us some Coromantees.’
‘But we’ve no qualifications,’ John protested. ‘The island is awash with surgeons, real surgeons.’
‘Ah, but we’re Scotch, which Mr Underwood seems to consider as fine a qualification as any. And how many of these real surgeons you speak of have ever been challenged to produce their degrees? We studied in Glasgow, or Aberdeen, or Edinburgh, it doesn’t matter which, none of the medical men here are young enough to say it’s odd how they never met us in the dissecting room – except Davie, and he’ll not betray us. And if we’re lacking our papers it’s because of our political indiscretions, which obliged us to leave a wee bit hurriedly. Nobody will care, if only we’re competent. There’s to be an amnesty soon anyway, they’re saying, for folk like you that were out. So we must practise, and get competence, and Davie’s the man that will help us to get it. And in any event it’ll only be practising on slaves, so we can afford a few minor mistakes. A few major ones, even.’
‘We’d need land, too,’ said John. ‘No point in having slaves if we’ve nowhere to work them.’
‘There’s land a-plenty here. But we’ll keep an eye out for what’s already been reclaimed and planted. Buy a share in a small plantation, buy the whole of it, and build it up.’
‘Maybe to leeward,’ John said, ‘in the west, where Underwood and George Kinloch are. Westmoreland’s the youngest parish, it’s not so congested as this end.’
‘Aye,’ James said, ‘we’ll get over to leeward in a while. But first we’ll be doctors. What do you say?’
John Wedderburn thought of touching black flesh, cutting into it, gangrenous rot, infestations, flux, fever. He remembered the limb-scattered field of Culloden. Surely he could steel himself. Surely he could.
He smiled at his brother. ‘You’re a scoundrel, James. I say we shall be doctors.’
Glen Isla, 1760 (#ulink_65e5d6a5-247f-55f0-80d8-35a3d812103d)
A dozen miles north and west of Savanna-la-Mar, the main town and port of Westmoreland, the westernmost parish of Jamaica, the soil-rich plain of the Cabarita river gave way to the lower slopes of the mountains. Here, a rough road curled up into the hills, and the landscape took on a wilder aspect than that of the sugar-growing flat land that stretched down to the sea. Wilder, and yet somehow comfortingly familiar. Up in the hills the heat was less intense, less humid. If you discounted the size and abundance of the vegetation, you could almost believe yourself to be in a Scottish glen.
