A Respectable Trade

‘Even so.’

There was a brief irritated silence. Brother and sister waited for the other to speak.

‘I’m going to the coffee house,’ Josiah said. ‘I shall see if anyone is interested in coming into partnership with us for the Lily. She is due home at the end of November; we need to buy in trade goods and refit her.’

Sarah glanced at the diary on her desk. ‘She set sail from Jamaica this month, God willing.’

Josiah tapped his large foot on the wooden floorboards for luck. The modest buckle on his shoe winked in the light. ‘You have the accounts for the Lily’s last voyage to hand?’

‘You had better seek a partner without showing them. We barely broke even.’

Josiah smiled. His large front teeth were stained with tobacco. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘But she is a good ship and Captain Merrick is usually reliable.’

Sarah rose from her desk, crossed over to the window and looked down. ‘If you see Mr Peters in the coffee house we are still waiting for his money for the equipping of the Daisy,’ she said. ‘The ship sailed two weeks ago and he has not yet paid for his share. We cannot extend credit like this.’

‘I’ll tell him,’ Josiah said. ‘I will be home for dinner.’ He paused at the door. ‘You do not congratulate me on my engagement to be married?’

She did not turn from the window, and her face was hidden from him. He did not see her look of sour resentment. Sarah’s marriageable years had slipped away while she worked for her father and then for his heir, her brother, screwing tiny profits out of a risky business. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I congratulate you. I hope that it will bring you what you desire.’

Siko was unwilling to leave the city of Oyo. He was a city boy who had sold himself into slavery with Mehuru when his parents died. He had thought that with a young man whose career was centred on the court he would be safe from the discomfort of farming work and rural life. He was deeply reluctant to venture out into the countryside, which he regarded as a dangerous place inhabited by wild animals and surly peasants.

‘For the last time,’ Mehuru said abruptly. ‘Finish packing and fetch the horses or I shall sell you to a brothel.’

Siko bowed his head at the empty threat and moved only slightly faster. He was confident that Mehuru would never ill-treat him, and indeed he was saving money to buy his freedom from his young master as they had agreed.

‘Should we not take porters and guards?’ he asked. ‘My brother said he would be willing to come with us.’

‘We will be travelling along trading routes,’ Mehuru said patiently. ‘We will be meeting porters and guards on the trading caravans all along the way. If there is any danger on the roads we can travel with them. I am on an urgent mission, we are travelling at speed. You would have us dawdling along the road and stopping at every village.’

‘I would have us stay snug in the city,’ Siko muttered into a saddlebag. Aloud he said: ‘We are packed, sir, and ready to leave.’

Mehuru nodded to him to load the bags and went into his room. In the corner were his priestly things, laid out for meditation. The divining tray made out of beautifully polished wood indented with circular cups filled with cowrie shells, the little purse filled with ash, a cube of chalk, a flask of oil. Mehuru picked them up one by one and put them into a soft leather satchel, letting his mind linger on them and calling for vision.

Nothing came. Instead he saw once more the prow of a ship, rocking gently on clear tropical waters. He could see a shoal of small fish nibbling at the copper casing of the wooden hull, something he had never seen in waking life. Again he smelled the heavy sickly smell of sugar and sepsis.

‘What does it mean?’ he whispered softly. ‘What does it mean?’

He shuddered as if the day were not pulsing with heat, as if he could feel a coldness like death. ‘What does it mean, this ship?’ He waited for an answer but he could hear nothing but Siko complaining to the cook about the prospect of a journey and the chattering of a flock of glossy starlings, gathering on the rooftop, their deep blue feathers iridescent in the morning sun.

He shrugged. No ship could endanger him; his journey lay northwards, inland. To the north were the long rolling plains of savannah country, an inland river or two, easily forded or crossed by boat, and then even further north – at the limits of the mighty Yoruba kingdom – the great desert of the Sahel. No ship could be a threat to him, he was far from the coast. Perhaps he should see the ship as a good omen, perhaps it was a vision of a slaving ship which would no longer be able to cruise casually off the coast of his country and gather in his country’s children as greedily as a marauding hyena.

Mehuru picked up his satchel of goods and slung it over his shoulders. Whatever the meaning of the vision, he had a job to do and nothing would prevent him. He bundled his travelling cape into a neat roll and went out into the brilliant midday sunshine. The horses were waiting, and the great city gates set deep into the mighty walls of the famous city of Oyo had been open since dawn.

‘So!’ he said cheerfully to Siko. ‘Off we go!’

The quayside coffee shop was on the opposite side of the river from Josiah’s dock, and so he took the little ferryboat across and tossed the lad who rowed him a ha’penny. The coffee shop was the regular meeting place for all the merchants of Bristol from the finest men to the smallest traders. When Josiah pushed open the small door his eyes smarted at the strong aromatic smell. The place was thick with tobacco smoke and the hot familiar scent of coffee, rum, and molasses. Josiah, with his hat under his arm, went slowly from table to table, seeing who was there. All of the merchants were known to him, but only a few did business with him regularly. At the best table, farthest from the damp draughts from the swinging door, were the great merchants of Bristol, in fine coats and crisp laundered linen. They did not even glance up when Josiah said ‘Good day’ to them. Josiah was not worth their attention.

He nodded politely in their direction, accepting the snub. When he was nephew by marriage to Lord Scott they would return his greeting, and he would be bidden to sit with them. Then he would see the cargo manifests which were spread on their table. Then he would have a chance at the big partnerships and the big trading ventures. Then he would command their friendship, and have access to their capital for his own ventures. They would invite him to join their association – the Merchant Venturers of Bristol – and all the profits and opportunities of the second-greatest provincial city in Britain would fall open to him.

‘Josiah!’ a voice called. ‘Over here!’

Josiah turned and saw a table crowded with men of his own class, small traders who shared and shared again the risks of a voyage, men who scrambled over each other for the great prizes of the Trade and yet who would be wiped out by the loss of one ship. Josiah could not reject their company. His own father had been an even lesser man – trading with a fleet of flat-bottomed trows up and down the Severn: coal from Wales, wheat from Somerset, cattle from Cornwall. Only at the very end of his life had George Cole owned an ocean-going ship and she had been a broken-down privateer which had managed one voyage for him before she sank. But on that one voyage she had taken a French trading ship, and claimed all her cargo. She had shown a profit of thousands of pounds and the Cole fortune had been made, and the Cole shipping line founded. George Cole had put up his sign ‘Cole and Sons’, and bequeathed the business to his son and daughter. They had made it their life’s work to expand yet further.

Two men seated on a bench moved closer to make space for Josiah. Their damp clothes steamed slightly in the warmth and there was a prevailing smell of stale sweat and wet wool.

‘Good day,’ Josiah said. He nodded at the waiter for coffee and the boy brought him a pot with a cup and a big bowl of moist brown lump sugar.

‘You did well on the Daisy then,’ the man who had called him commented. ‘Prices are holding up for sugar. But you get no tobacco worth the shipping.’

Josiah nodded. ‘It was a good voyage,’ he said. ‘I won’t buy tobacco out of season. I’ll only take sugar. I did well on the Daisy and we turned her around quickly.’

‘Do you have a partner for your next voyage?’ the man opposite him asked. He spoke with a thick Somerset accent.

‘I am seeking a partner for the Lily. She will be in port within two months.’

‘And who commands her?’

‘Captain Merrick. There is no more experienced master in Bristol,’ Josiah said.

The man nodded. ‘D’you have the accounts for her last voyage?’

Josiah shook his head, lying with easy fluency. ‘They are with the Excise men,’ he explained. ‘Some trouble over the bond last time. But the Daisy is a better example in any case. She was fresh into port and showed a profit of three hundred pounds for each shareholder. You won’t find a better breeding-ground for your money than that!’

The man nodded. ‘Could be,’ he said uncertainly.

Josiah dropped two crumbling lumps of thick brown sugar into his coffee, savouring the sweetness, the very scent of the Trade, and signalled for a glass of rich dark rum. ‘As you wish,’ he said casually. ‘I have other men that should have the offer first, perhaps. I only mentioned it because of your interest. Think no more about it.’

‘Oh no,’ the man said quickly. ‘What share would you be looking for?’

‘A quarter,’ Josiah replied coolly. He looked away from the table and nodded a greeting at another man.

‘And how much would that be?’

Josiah seemed to be barely listening. ‘Oh, I couldn’t say …’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Perhaps a thousand pounds each, perhaps nine hundred. Say no more than nine hundred.’

The man looked rather dashed. ‘I had not thought it would be so much …’

Josiah turned his brown-stained smile on him. ‘You will not regret it being so much when it shows a profit of twenty or thirty per cent. Eh?’

‘And who will be the ship’s husband? You? You will do all the fitting and the orders?’

‘Myself,’ Josiah said. ‘I always do. I would trust it to no other man. But I should not have troubled you with this. There is Mr Wheeler now, I promised him a share in the Lily.’

‘No, stay,’ the man protested. ‘I will take a share, Josiah. I will have my share in her.’

Josiah nodded easily. ‘As you wish, Samuel.’ He held out his hand and the other grasped it quickly. ‘Come to my warehouse this afternoon, and bring your bond. I will have the contract for you.’

The man nodded, half-excited and half-fearful. He rose from the table and went out. He would be busy from now until the afternoon scouring the city for credit to raise his share.

‘I had not thought he had nine hundred pounds to outlay,’ one of the others remarked. ‘You had best see your money before you sign, Josiah.’

Josiah shrugged. Despite himself, his eyes strayed to the table at the top of the room. The men had called for a pie, a ham and some bread and cheese for their breakfasts. They were drinking port. They were joking loudly, and their faces were flushed. They did not have to haggle over some small man’s life savings to finance a voyage. They carved up the profitable voyages among themselves, they shared the profits from the docks – even the barges that plied up and down the Avon paid them a fee, the little ferryboat and even the lighthouses paid them rent.

‘I have some news,’ Josiah said abruptly. ‘I am to be married.’

There was a stunned silence at the little table.

‘To the niece of Lord Scott of Whiteleaze,’ Josiah went on. ‘His lordship will be calling on me soon and we will settle the marriage contract.’

‘My God! Josiah!’ one exclaimed.

‘Wherever did you meet the lady?’ one of the others asked. The rest simply gaped.

‘She called on us,’ Josiah lied convincingly. ‘She knows a friend of my sister’s. They were at school together.’

The men could hardly find words. ‘I had thought you would be a bachelor forever!’ one of them said.

‘And with Sarah to keep house for you! I never thought you would marry.’

‘I was waiting for the right lady,’ Josiah said precisely. ‘And for my fortunes to be on such a rise that I could offer her a proper position in life.’

The men nodded. The news was too staggering to be taken in all at once. ‘I had not thought he was doing that well,’ one of the men muttered.

‘I shall move from the warehouse,’ Josiah said. ‘I shall take a new house for my wife.’

‘Where will you live?’

‘I shall buy a house in Queens Square,’ Josiah said. Again he glanced towards the top table. The men there owned Queens Square outright; it had been built by the Corporation, to their design. They could choose whether or not to sell to him. Money alone could not buy him into their neighbourhood; but with Lord Scott’s niece on his arm he would be welcomed in the elegant brick-faced square. Josiah would call them ‘neighbour’ and his new wife would visit their wives.

The men at the table nodded. ‘And the lady …’

‘Shall we return to business?’ Josiah asked with a small triumphant smile. ‘I think that is enough about the lady who is to be Mrs Cole.’

They nodded, as impressed by the triumph of his marriage as by his quiet dignity.

‘About this voyage of the Lily,’ one of them said. ‘I think I’ll take a share after all. Will his lordship be coming in with us?’

Josiah smiled slightly. ‘Oh, I should think so,’ he said.

Mehuru’s mission was going well. He went from town to town and even stopped at the councils of the larger villages as he worked his way north-west across the great rolling plains of the Yoruba nation. The villagers knew that he was talking nothing more than sense. For all the profits that could be made from the slave trade – and they were beyond the dreams of most farming communities – there were terrible stories, garbled in the telling, of rivers where no-one dare fish and woods where no-one could walk. Whole villages were desolate, hundreds, thousands of women and children abandoned and starving in fields which they could not farm alone. It was a blight spreading inland from the coast, a plague which took the young men and women, the fittest and the strongest, and left behind the ill, the old, and the babies.

This plague of slavery worked unlike any other. It took the healthy, it took the adventurous, it took the very men and women who should command the future. The guns and gold and fine cloth could not repay Africa for the loss of her brightest children. It was the future leaders who were bled away, along the rivers, down the trade routes.

‘This is where it stops,’ Mehuru said firmly in one town council after another. ‘One nation has to refuse. One nation has to throw up a wall and say that it must end here. Otherwise what will become of us? Already the trade routes running north are unsafe, and the wealth of this nation depends on our trade. We send our leather goods, we send our brassware, we send our rich luxuries north, across the Sahel Desert to the Arab nations, and we buy our spices and silk from them. All our trade has always been north to south, and now the slavers are cutting the routes.

‘The coastal forests and plains are becoming deserted. Who will fish if the coast is abandoned? Where shall we get salt if the women cannot dry it in the salt pans? Where shall we get food if we cannot farm? How can a country be strong and safe and wealthy if every day a hundred, two hundred men are stolen?’

The men in the village councils nodded. Many of them showed the profits of the slave trade with ragged shirts of cotton woven in Manchester, and guns forged in Birmingham. But they were quick to notice that the vivid dyes of the cottons bled out after a few washings, and the guns were deadly to the users as well as to the victims when they misfired. No-one could deny that the slave trade was an unequal deal in which Africa was losing her brightest sons in exchange for tatty goods and shoddy wares.

Mehuru worked his way north, persuading, cajoling. He and Siko became accustomed to riding all day and camping out at night. Siko grew deft at building small campfires for cooking when they were out in the open savannah. The young man and the boy ate together, sharing the same bowl, and then rolled themselves up in their cloaks and slept side by side. They were fit and hardened by exercise and quietly companionable. Every time they stopped for Mehuru to tell the village elders of the new laws they heard more news, and all of it bad. The trade goods were faulty, the muskets blew to pieces the first time they were fired, maiming and killing. The rum was poisonous, the gold lace and smart hats were tawdry rubbish. Worse than that, the white men were establishing gangs of African brigands who belonged to no nation and followed no laws but their own whim, who cruised the rivers and seized a solitary man, a child playing hide and seek with his mother, a girl on her way to a lovers’ meeting. There could be no rule of law where kidnappers and thieves were licensed and paid in munitions.

Some of the coastal nations now dealt in nothing but slaves. They had turned from a rich tradition of fishing, agriculture, hunting and trading, to being slaving nations, with only men to sell, and gold to buy everything they might need. Nations of brigands, terrible nations of outlaws.

And the white men no longer kneeled to the kings of the coastal nations. They had built their own stone castles, they had placed their own cannon in their own forts. Up and down the rivers they had built great warehouses, huge stone barns where slaves could be collected, collected in hundreds, even thousands, and then shipped on, downriver, to the forts at the river mouth. There was no longer any pretence that the African kings were permitting the trade. It was a white man’s business and the African armies were their servants. The balance of power had shifted totally and completely. The white men commanded all along the coast by the power of the gun and the power of their gold.

The more Mehuru heard, the more certain he became that the Yoruba states were right to stand against slavery. The wickedness of slavery, its random cruelty, no longer disturbed him as much as the threat to the whole future of the continent which was opening before him like a vision of hell: a country ruled by the gun for the convenience of strangers, where no-one could be safe.

‘If slavery is such a bad thing,’ Siko said one night as they lay together under the dark sky, ‘I suppose you’ll be setting me free as soon as we get back to Oyo.’

Mehuru reached out a foot and kicked him gently. ‘You buy yourself out as we agreed,’ he said. ‘You’ve been robbing me blind for years anyway.’

He smiled as he slept; but in the night, under the innocent arch of the sky, he dreamed of the ship again. He dreamed of it cruising in warm shallow water, its deck misshapen by a thatched shelter, the sides shuttered with nets. In its wake were occasional dark, triangular fins. There were sharks following the ship, drawn through the seas by the garbage thrown overboard, and by the promising smell of sickness and despair. They could scent blood and the likelihood of death. The prow sliced through the clean water like a knife into flesh, and its wake was like a wound. Mehuru started awake and found that he was sweating as if he had been running in terror. It was the ship again, his nightmare ship.

He woke Siko. It was nearly dawn, he wanted the company of the boy. ‘Let’s go and swim,’ he said. ‘Let’s go down to the river.’

The boy was reluctant to get up, warning of crocodiles and hippos in the river, and poisonous snakes on the path. Mehuru caught the edge of the boy’s cloak and rolled him out.

‘Come on,’ he said impatiently. He wanted to wash the dream away, he wanted to play like a child in the water and then run back and eat porridge for breakfast. They had camped in the bend of a river and slept on the dry bank. Mehuru left his things by the embers of last night’s fire and jogged, half-naked, to the river. Siko trotted behind him, still complaining. The coolness of the morning air cleared his head, he could feel his breath coming faster and the dark ominous shadow of the ship receding.

Ahead of them was the river, fringed with trees, the tall nodding heads of the rhun palm making a continual comforting clatter as the dried leaves pattered against each other. He ran between an avenue of locust bean trees, the broad gnarled trunks on either side of him, the fluttering feathery leaves brushing the top of his head. He could see the river, the green water gleaming through the thick undergrowth. A flock of plantain eaters swooped overhead, pied birds calling coop-coop-coop in a melodic chatter, and brightly coloured parrots flew up as Mehuru and Siko ran easily side by side. Mehuru’s feet scrunched on white sand and he was pausing to catch his breath and to check the water for crocodile or hippo when he saw, from the corner of his eye, a shadow launch forward and in the same moment he was buffeted by a blow which flung him to the ground.

He struggled to get his arms free but he was winded and helpless under the weight of his attacker. He heard another man running forwards and saw a club rising above him and he cried out in terror, ‘Siko! Run! Run!’ as the blow crushed his head and flung him into fragments of darkness.

His last thought, as the dark shape of the nightmare ship rose up in his mind to blot out the sunlight and the gleam of the green water, was that he, of all people, should have known how far inland the slavers might have come.

At Mrs Daley’s house, Dowry Parade, the Hot Well, Bristol.

11th November 1787

Dear Frances,

I am Writing this before I leave for London as I Know you would want to Know at once my thoughts on Mr Josiah Cole.

I find him a Plain and simple Man, on whose Word I think we can Rely. I have had sight of his Company books and he seems to be well-established, tho’ he is not a member of the Merchant Adventurers nor of the Africa Company, which is a regret to him. However, the Friends you can bring may Rectify the Omission.

He was Not demanding as to your Dowry and we have settled matters to our Satisfaction. I have taken a Share, on your behalf, in the cargo of one of his ships, the Daisy, which is loading off Africa in this Month. Another of his ships, the Lily, came into port while I was there and I watched the unloading of his Wealth in the Form of Sugar and Rum. It is a Risky business, but highly profitable. I have no Hesitation in believing that you will be well Provided for during your Marriage; and if Widowed, you will Enjoy an adequate jointure. We have Agreed that there is no haste for the Marriage and since you have to complete your contract with Mrs Snelling, and he hopes to Buy a house Suitable for his new Family, we have fixed it for the month of July next year. It is Not what your father would have wished, but I Agree with you that it is the best you can Anticipate.

As to the Pupils you were to teach, he made no Mention of them, except as a Scheme he had in Mind for later. My principal concern was your Sister-in-law, Miss Sarah Cole, who does not Seem to welcome the Match. However, you will have Dealt with more Intractable domestic situations at Home and with Mrs Snelling.

I shall be home within the Sennight, and will drive over to Mrs Snelling’s house to discuss the matter with you then.

Yours,

Scott.

Mehuru regained consciousness with an aching head and flies buzzing about the blood on his temple. His arms were bound behind him and his neck was lashed into a forked wooden brace with rough hemp twine. At his side was Siko, whimpering pitifully, his neck-brace paired with Mehuru’s so that they were bound together like some misshapen yam which sprouts a twin. They were whipped to their feet and then directed down the river path to where their captors had hidden their boats. Every stumble Siko made tore Mehuru’s neck and knocked him from his stride. They fell together in a helpless embrace and were whipped until they stood again. Only when they fell into a slavish head-bowed shuffle could they move forward, and even then both their necks were rubbed through bruises into bleeding sores. ‘I am sorry, sir, I am sorry,’ Siko wept. ‘I am sorry.’