“Well—” Carsten was distracted by the appearance of the Eikhoorn, just coming around the upriver bend. It reminded him of the exciting day that they had seized the Tritón, and sunk its longboat, not many yards from where the Eikhoorn was plowing back downriver.
The longboat. He started cursing.
“Carsten, what’s wrong?” asked Maria.
“We know from the reports that the Africans who have been causing trouble have weapons. I just figured out where they got them from.” He pointed upriver.
“I don’t understand . . . oh . . . the longboat? But wouldn’t the weapons all be rusted?”
“By now they would be. But if they were found early enough, not irretrievably. The rust could have been scraped off.”
“But how would they have known where to look? You don’t suppose a colonist told them?”
“Perhaps. It might not have been evil in intent. A colonist might have bragged about the battle. Anyway, I will have the damn boat brought up. We’ll take a count of how many bodies, guns and swords are still there, and that will let us make a good guess as to what was taken.”
Carsten stood up. “The crew of the Eikhoorn is going to have to wait a little longer for their supper, I’m afraid. As for your problem, I think you are going to have to find a way for your Coromantee protégé to find the money himself. If he does, then the Society could perhaps find a trustworthy agent to send. A priest, perhaps.”
* * *
The three Ndongo warriors, Mukala, Aka, and Miguel, studied the bodies of their fallen comrades. Both bore diagonal gashes on their foreheads, but their death wounds were elsewhere.
“Imbangala,” Mukala said. The Imbangala were in the habit of distinctively marking their kills so that each warrior could claim the bodies of the enemies he had slain, have them carried back to the camp by his slaves, and then eat them with the proper formalities so that their ghosts couldn’t haunt the slayer.
Miguel pointed to the death wound. “That wasn’t made by a spear.”
“No,” Mukala agreed. “It’s a slash, not a thrust.”
“And look how clean the edges are,” said Aka. “That wasn’t made with sharpened wood, or flint. It was a cut from a steel blade.”
“This is very bad news,” said Miguel. “The whites are arming the Imbangala with cutlasses. That is the only possible explanation.”
“We should have wiped out the filthy Kasanje Imbangala right after we landed,” said Mukala. “We had the advantage of numbers then.” Many Ndongo, warriors and farmers alike, had been captured and shipped to the New World, to work Portuguese sugar plantations and Spanish silver mines. There were relatively few Imbangala on the slave ship because most were Portuguese allies. But Kasanje, who led one of the Imbangala bands, had set up an independent state in 1620, and so his people were fair game.
“That is easy to say now,” reproved Aka. “But we were so thirsty we could barely move our limbs when we were freed.” The slave ship had gone first to Angola, and tried its luck, even though it didn’t have a proper license and therefore had to collect slaves on the sly. It ventured farther north, among the Coromantee, Eboe and Mandinka, only because it hadn’t been able to fill its hold. So the Angolans had endured the privations of middle passage longer than any of their brothers in suffering.
Mukala made a gesture of propitiation to the gods. “Powers forbid we suffer so again!”
Miguel added thoughtfully, “If we had attacked the Imbangala immediately, the whites might have feared that we would attack them next, and turned their swivel guns on us.”
“Do you think the Imbangala have guns, too?” asked Mukala. “If so, we are in big trouble.”
“Don’t know, but we better tell the elders what we found.” Aka pointed at the bodies. “In the meantime let’s rig a sled for these bodies. I’ll not leave them for the Imbangala. And be quick about it; we don’t know when they’ll be back.”
A few days later, the Ndongo moved their encampment some miles farther east, away from the Gustavans and, they hoped, the Imbangala.
* * *
The Gustavans’ spirits were lifted by the somewhat belated arrival of the four-hundred-ton, eighteen-gun Walvis, their lifeline to the USE. It was commanded by Captain David Pieterszoon de Vries, president of the USE-chartered United Equatorial Company—their employer. It was accompanied by a jacht, the six-gun Siraen.
He brought news that was both welcome and unsettling. Welcome, in that peace had finally come to the Low Countries. Unsettling, in that there was now a Catholic king in the Netherlands, Don Fernando. The colonists, many of whom came from the Netherlands, were mostly Protestants, and therefore not inclined to trust the ex-cardinal infante’s promise of religious tolerance—even if Fredrik Hendrik was now a “trusted advisor.”