But they didn’t get the chance, for the slavers reached a rocky island ahead of us and abandoned ship, taking their human cargo with them. We were still half a mile off and powerless to interfere as a dozen or so white-robed Arabs and upwards of a hundred naked niggers, men, women, and children, were tumbling ashore and up into the rocks; we could hear their squeals and the crack of the courbashes as the slavers lashed them on, the leader of the gang turning to jeer and gesture obscenely as we hove to a pistol-shot off shore. Ballantyne danced with rage and shook his fist.
‘You disgusting bastards, I’ll larn you!’ yells he, his voice fairly cracking. ‘Bosun, stand by the gun – no, belay that! Marines, take aim at that son-of-a-bitch – no, dammit, belay that too!’ For the slavers’ leader had snatched up one of the infants as a shield, and his rascals followed suit or mingled with the panic-stricken slaves so that we daren’t fire.
‘Oh, you cads!’ bawls Ballantyne. ‘Oh, you cowardly rotters! You shan’t escape us! Run her in, bosun! Stand by with your cutlasses, you men! We’ll settle your hash, you beastly black villains! They can’t outrun us with the slaves! Pistols, Tomkins, and load two for me! And two for Sir Harry – and a cutlass! We’ll run ’em to earth in a jiffy, sir, what? Ha-ha!’
He was such a happy little blood-spiller, just bursting to be at the enemy, that I hated to spoil his fun, but I was shot if I was going to be plunged into a cut-and-thrust brawl with those desperate brutes – and I had the perfect excuse for overriding him. I bellowed an order to the engineer to hold on, and cut short Ballantyne’s falsetto protest.
‘Sorry, my lad, it’s no go! We’re carrying an army’s treasury, and it ain’t to be risked for a gaggle of slaves!’
‘But we can cut ’em up in no time, and rescue the poor souls!’ cries he. ‘We’ve done it before, you know! Bosun’ll tell you—’
‘Well, you ain’t doing it today,’ says I, and he was hitting Top C until the bosun shook his head and said I was right, beggin’ your pardon, sir, can’t risk the dollars no-how. Ballantyne looked as though he would cry, but made the best of it like a good ’un.
‘Quite right, Sir Harry, I wasn’t thinkin’! Forgive me – dam’ thoughtless! I say, though, we can sink the beggars’ boat! That’ll spoil their filthy trade for them! Bosun, man the gun!’
‘Wot abaht the slaves, sir?’ says bosun. ‘Them black devils is liable to cut their throats aht o’ spite if we sink her.’
Ballantyne weighed this for a good two seconds, frowning judicially like Buggins Major undecided whether to thrash Juggins Minor or set him a hundred lines of Virgil. Then he snapped: ‘No. If we don’t scupper ’em those poor creatures will be sold like cattle. They cannot be worse off if they and those fiends are left stranded. And by gum there’ll be one less hell-ship runnin’ black ivory!’
Bosun touched his hat, but pointed out that their six-pounder would take all day to smash the slaver’s timbers. ‘Then burn the bugger!’ cries Ballantyne, and two men were sent in the gig to set her ablaze with bundles of tow. She went up like a November bonfire, while the slavers screamed helplessly from the hillside. Then we stood off, Ballantyne scowling and vowing vengeance.
‘It’s too bad!’ says he. ‘The white-livered ruffians always take to the nearest shore, but we’ve chased ’em and brought off the slaves two or three times, ’cos they never make a fight of it, the chicken-hearted scoundrels!’ He stared back at the shore and the blazing vessel. ‘Aye, they’re well up in the rocks, the beasts – and you must be careful, you know. Chum of mine, Jack Legerwood, chased one gang too far, just a couple of months ago. They caught him, made an awful mess of him, poor old chap. Gad, if I could only lay hands on them!’
You know my opinion of heroics, and I’d not break sweat myself to save a parcel of handless niggers being sold into slavery – which is probably no worse than the lives they’ve been living in some desert pesthole, and may well be a blessed change for the females who find a billet in some randy bashaw’s harem. I mentioned this to Ballantyne, and he blushed crimson and exclaimed: ‘I say!’ A true-blue Arnoldian paladin, he was, pure of heart and full of Christian zeal to cherish the weak and have a grand time cutting up the ungodly.
But I ain’t mocking him, much, and I’ve a sight more use for him and his like than for the psalm-smiting Holy Joes who pay lip-service to delivering the heathen from error’s chain by preaching and giving their ha’pence to the Anti-Slavery Society, but spare never a thought for young Ballantyne holding the sea-lanes for civilisation and Jack Legerwood dying the kind of death you wouldn’t wish for your worst enemy. I’ve even heard ’em maligned like my old shipmate Brookefn2 for taking a high hand and shooting first and hammering slavers and pirates and brigands like the wrath of God. Censure’s so easy at a distance, but I’ve seen them on the frontiers, schoolboys with the down still on their cheeks doing a man’s work and getting a seedeboy’s pay12 and damn-all thanks and more often than not a bullet for their twenty-first birthday – why, I’d just seen one, too young to vote, weighing a hundred black lives in the balance, and deciding, in a couple of seconds, the kind of fearful question his reverend seniors at home would have shied a mile from.
I think he was right, by the way, and I speak from experience, having shirked responsibility too often to count. But the Ballantynes and Legerwoods didn’t, and if the slave trade has been swept off the face of the seas, it hasn’t really been the work of reformers and statesmen with lofty ideals in London and Paris and Washington, but because a long-forgotten host of fairly feckless young Britons did it for fun. And you may tell the historians I said so.
It’s about a thousand miles from Sinai to the Abyssinian port of Zoola, and I supposed our frisky little steamer would cover it in no time, but it didn’t. Half way the boiler sprang a leak, and it was the grace of God that we were off Jedda at the time, for in those days it was the only place worth a damn on the whole benighted Red Sea coast, being the port where the Muslim pilgrims disembark for Mecca, which lies a couple of days’ march inland. Consequently the place is aswarm with them, arriving and departing in every kind of boat from Chinese junks and ancient steamers to feluccas and coracles. We had a consul there, and the Navy were always on hand; they used the place as a rendezvous, with a supply depot and smithy where our engineer was able to get his kettle mended.
There’s a place called El Golea in the deep Sahara which they say is the hottest spot on earth, but I’ll put my money on Jedda – or anywhere else on the Red Sea for that matter. We sweltered for days, and the bosun won a bet from the marines by frying an egg on the deck. The waterfront was a bedlam of boats, and the town itself was choked with a vast milling horde of pilgrims who turned it into a human ant-heap, with the heat and stench rising from it in choking waves which I’ll swear were visible above the famous white walls. I lay gasping under an awning trying to ignore the deafening din of a million niggers shouting and wailing as I leafed through an old copy of Punch in which there was a rhyme about Britons in chains in Abyssinia, and a cartoon of Emperor Theodore as a thick-lipped sambo – well wide of the mark, as I was to discover.
Punch didn’t think much of our expedition, and had a fine old grouse about War Office muddle, and the cost to the middle classes which they said should be defrayed by nabbing Theodore and exhibiting him in a cage at the Egyptian Hall on Piccadilly at a shilling a time.13
If I was impatient of delay, Ballantyne was fit to burst; there were a couple of sloops like ours about to weigh anchor for some place down the Arabian coast where our native spies had word of a great cargo of slaves coming from the African shore, and our young