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Rough Passage to London(103)

By:Robin Lloyd


Morgan had smiled at this image.

“That’s one I should remember, Monsieur Mailliard.”

He recalled that night well. His first mate was tending to the ship. Lowery had just served an entire meal in French, showing off his New Orleans roots. They had potage de tortue, côtelettes de veau, quenelles de brochet avec une sauce de crème et de caviar Américain, and a distinctively American dessert, apple fritters with maple syrup. The moody Bonaparte had retired early after losing several games of backgammon, but Morgan had stayed up with Mailliard to continue their discussion and finish off a decanter of sherry from Spain. They were talking about whether the French would soon abolish slavery. Under Louis Philippe, the French government had recently made the slave trade a crime, but they had not freed their slaves despite a growing clamor to do so in the Chamber of Deputies. That was when Mailliard brought up the horrors of the infamous French slaving ship Le Rodeur. He explained how the dramatic story of that ship’s voyage had been a rallying cry of French abolitionists for years.

“Ecoutez-moi, Capitan Morgan, c’est une histoire triste. Le voyage commençait à Le Havre en 1819. Le Rodeur picked up a full load of 160 Africans on the Calabar River in West Africa and set sail for Guadeloupe. Somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, the slaves in the cargo hold started to go blind. Imaginez l’horreur! Even though the crew was lowering food down to the Africans in slings, the mysterious disease began to quickly spread. The men’s weepy eyes burned and crusted over, swelling shut. The captain and his mate soon became stone blind, as did most of the sailors. The slaves were left below, writhing in misery in a dark world. They were all infected with ophthalmia.”

The similarity with his brother’s journal was uncanny.

“What happened to that ship?” Morgan had asked as he poured himself and Monsieur Mailliard another glass of sherry.

“Le Rodeur arrived in Guadeloupe, but most all of the slaves and their captors were either blind or partially so. Had you never heard this story before, Captain?”

Morgan shook his head, but then added, “I have heard a similar story about a different ship in 1816, but I don’t know what happened to it.”

The Frenchman nodded soberly before speaking again.

“It is stories like Le Rodeur that j’espère, I hope, may one day persuade the French to finally end this horrible practice of human bondage.”





Morgan rubbed the ivory figure in his right hand as he looked at the same pool of sunlight that had now shifted to his mahogany desk. He thought again of his brother, and the troubling words in his journal. The story of Le Rodeur had given him a faint hope that Abraham might still be alive. The Charon, a British ship, had been a slave trader. That was clear. His brother had been infected with ophthalmia, but that didn’t mean that he had gone blind like some of the others. He knew that John Taylor had not; nor had Blackwood. Maybe there was hope. He put the ivory figure of the king down and got up out of his chair to look at himself again in the small mirror. He heard the mate’s voice pierce the early morning air, and he knew he would soon be needed on deck. His important visitor would be arriving soon. He straightened his cravat and told himself that today he needed to look his best.





23





Hours later, Morgan stood nervously on the ship’s quarterdeck, scanning the docks. All the preparations had been made. He had been told that his special guest would arrive in her own closed carriage at eleven o’clock. The church bells in the distance had just struck the hour. He looked up above him at the ship’s masts. All the sailors were dressed in their red shirts and were standing erect in the yards. Then he heard the scraping of the heavy metal gates open. He spotted an ornate black and yellow carriage drawn by a handsome pair of grays glide through the gates at St. Katherine’s. Moments later, another carriage, pulled by two high-stepping bays, followed. The horses clip-clopped their way toward his ship. Morgan had never been so nervous. He could just make out a young woman’s face inside the carriage, peering out at the ships. Seated next to her was a man in a high-collared black coat. Within moments, the two carriages had drawn up adjacent to his ship.

He had been told that this would be an informal visit with little fanfare, but the crowds within the docks began cheering loudly as soon as the small woman dressed in a white ruffled dress was helped out of her carriage. The man with the high-collared coat followed closely behind her. Morgan was surprised at how young she seemed, but then he reminded himself that she was only twenty-four years old. It was hard for him to fathom that the Queen of England, the sovereign of the world’s richest and most powerful country, had come to visit his ship, which bore her name.