A Master of Fortune Being Further Adventures of Captain Kettle

Excerpt

CHAPTER I

IN QUARANTINE

"The pay is small enough," said Captain Kettle, staring at the blue paper. "It's a bit hard for a man of my age and experience to come down to a job like piloting, on eight pound a month and my grub."

"All right, Capt'n," replied the agent. "You needn't tell me what I know already. The pay's miserable, the climate's vile, and the bosses are beasts. And yet we have more applicants for these berths on the Congo than there are vacancies for. And f'why is it, Capt'n? Because there's no questions asked. The Congo people want men who can handle steamers. Their own bloomin' Belgians aren't worth a cent for that, and so they have to get Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, English, Eytalians, or any one else that's capable. They prefer to give small pay, and are willing to take the men that for various reasons can't get better jobs elsewhere. Guess you'll know the crowd I mean?"

"Thoroughly, sir," said Kettle, with a sigh. "There are a very large number of us. But we're not all unfortunate through our own fault."

"No, I know," said the agent. "Rascally owners, unsympathetic Board of Trade, master's certificate suspended quite unjustly, and all that--" The agent looked at his watch. "Well, Capt'n, now, about this berth? Are you going to take it?"

"I've no other choice."

"Right," said the agent, and pulled a printed form on to the desk before him, and made a couple of entries. "Let's see--er--is there a Mrs. Kettle?"

"Married," said the little sailor; "three children."

The agent filled these details on to the form. "Just as well to put it down," he commented as he wrote. "I'm told the Congo Free State has some fancy new pension scheme on foot for widdys and kids, though I expect it'll come to nothing, as usual. They're a pretty unsatisfactory lot all round out there. Still you may as well have your chance of what plums are going. Yer age, Capt'n?"

"Thirty-eight."

"And--er--previous employment? Well, I suppose we had better leave that blank as usual. They never really expect it to be filled in, or they wouldn't offer such wretchedly small pay and commission. You've got your master's ticket to show, and that's about all they want."

"There's my wife's address, sir. I'd like my half-pay sent to her."

"She shall have it direct from Brussels, skipper, so long as you are alive--I mean, so long as you remain in the Congo Service."

Captain Kettle sighed again. "Shall I have to wait long before this appointment is confirmed?"

"Why, no," said the agent. "There's a boat sailing for the Coast to-morrow, and I can give you an order for a passage by her. Of course my recommendation has to go to Brussels to be ratified, but that's only a matter of form. They never refuse anybody that offers. They call the Government 'Leopold and Co.' down there on the Congo. You'll understand more about it when you're on the spot.

"I'm sorry for ye, Capt'n, but after what you told me, I'm afraid it's the only berth I can shove you into. However, don't let me frighten ye. Take care of yourself, don't do too much work, and you may pull through all right. Here's the order for the passage down Coast by the Liverpool boat. And now I must ask you to excuse me. I've another client waiting."

In this manner, then, Captain Owen Kettle found himself, after many years of weary knocking about the seas, enlisted into a regular Government service; and although this Government, for various reasons, happened to be one of the most unsatisfactory in all the wide, wide world, he thrust this item resolutely behind him, and swore to himself that if diligence and crew-driving could bring it about, he would rise in that service till he became one of the most notable men in Africa.

"What I want is a competence for the missus and kids," he kept on repeating to himself, "and the way to finger that competence is to get power." He never owned to himself that this thirst for power was one of the greatest curses of his life; and it did not occur to him that his lust for authority, and his ruthless use of it when it came in his way, were the main things which accounted for his want of success in life.

Captain Kettle's voyage down to the Congo on the British and African S.S. M'poso gave time for the groundwork of Coast language and Coast thought (which are like unto nothing else on this planet) to soak into his system. The steamer progressed slowly. She went up rivers protected by dangerous bars; she anchored in roadsteads, off forts, and straggling towns; she lay-to off solitary whitewashed factories, which only see a steamer twice a year, and brought off little doles of cargo in her surf-boats and put on the beaches rubbishy Manchester and Brummagem trade goods for native consumption; and the talk in her was that queer jargon with the polyglot vocabulary in which commerce is transacted all the way along the sickly West African seaboard, from the Goree to St. Paul de Loanda.

Every white man of the M'poso's crew traded on his own private account, and Kettle was initiated into the mysteries of the unofficial retail store in the forecastle, of whose existence Captain Image, the commander, and Mr. Balgarnie, the purser, professed a blank and child-like ignorance.

Kettle had come across many types of sea-trader in his time, but Captain Image and Mr. Balgarnie were new to him. But then most of his surroundings were new. Especially was the Congo Free State an organization which was quite strange to him. When he landed at Banana, Captain Nilssen, pilot of the Lower Congo and Captain of the Port of Banana, gave him advice on the subject in language which was plain and unfettered.

"They are a lot of swine, these Belgians," said Captain Nilssen, from his seat in the Madeira chair under the veranda of the pilotage, "and there's mighty little to be got out of them. Here am I, with a wife in Kjobnhavn and another in Baltimore, and I haven't been able to get away to see either of them for five blessed years. And mark you, I'm a man with luck, as luck goes in this hole. I've been in the lower river pilot service all the time, and got the best pay, and the lightest jobs. There's not another captain in the Congo can say as much. Some day or other they put a steamboat on the ground, and then they're kicked out from the pilot service, and away they're off one-time to the upper river above the falls, to run a launch, and help at the rubber palaver, and get shot at, and collect niggers' ears, and forget what champagne and white man's chop taste like."

"You've been luckier?"

"Some. I've libbed for Lower Congo all my time; had a home in the pilotage here; and got a dash of a case of champagne, or an escribello, or at least a joint of fresh meat out of the refrigerator from every steamboat I took either up or down."

"But then you speak languages?" said Kettle.

"Seven," said Captain Nilssen; "and use just one, and that's English. Shows what a fat lot of influence this État du Congo has got. Why, you have to give orders even to your boat-boys in Coast English if you want to be understood. French has no sort of show with the niggers."

Now white men are expensive to import to the Congo Free State, and are apt to die with suddenness soon after their arrival, and so the State (which is in a chronic condition of hard-up) does not fritter their services unnecessarily. It sets them to work at once so as to get the utmost possible value out of them whilst they remain alive and in the country.

A steamer came in within a dozen hours of Kettle's first stepping ashore, and signalled for a pilot to Boma. Nilssen was next in rotation for duty, and went off in his boat to board her, and he took with him Captain Owen Kettle to impart to him the mysteries of the great river's navigation.

The boat-boys sang a song explanatory of their notion of the new pilot's personality as they caught at the paddles, but as the song was in Fiote, even Nilssen could only catch up a phrase here and there, just enough to gather the drift. He did not translate, however. He had taken his new comrade's measure pretty accurately, and judged that he was not a man who would accept criticism from a negro. So having an appetite for peace himself, he allowed the custom of the country to go on undisturbed.

The steamer was outside, leaking steam at an anchorage, and sending out dazzling heliograms every time she rolled her bleached awnings to the sun. The pilot's boat, with her crew of savages, paddled towards her, down channels between the mangrove-planted islands. The water spurned up by the paddle blades was the color of beer, and the smell of it was puzzlingly familiar.

"Good old smell," said Nilssen, "isn't it? I see you snuffling. Trying to guess where you met it before, eh? We all do that when we first come. What about crushed marigolds, eh?"

"Crushed marigolds it is."

"Guess you'll get to know it better before you're through with your service here. Well, here we are alongside."

The steamer was a Portuguese, officered by Portuguese, and manned by Krooboys, and the smell of her drowned even the marigold scent of the river. Her dusky skipper exuded perspiration and affability, but he was in a great hurry to get on with his voyage. The forecastle windlass clacked as the pilot boat drew into sight, heaving the anchor out of the river floor; the engines were restarted so soon as ever the boat hooked on at the foot of the Jacob's ladder; and the vessel was under a full head of steam again by the time the two white men had stepped on to her oily deck.

"When you catch a Portuguese in a hurry like this," said Nilssen to Kettle as they made their way to the awninged bridge, "it means there's something wrong. I don't suppose we shall be told, but keep your eyes open."

However, there was no reason for prying. Captain Rabeira was quite open about his desire for haste. "I got baccalhao and passenger boys for a cargo, an' dose don' keep," said he.

"We smelt the fish all the way from Banana," said Nilssen. "Guess you ought to call it stinking fish, not dried fish, Captain. And we can see your nigger passengers. They seem worried. Are you losing 'em much?"

"I done funeral palaver for eight between Loanda an' here, an' dem was a dead loss-a. I don' only get paid for dem dat lib for beach at Boma. Dere was a fire-bar made fast to the leg of each for sinker, an' dem was my dead loss-a too. I don' get paid for fire-bars given to gastados--" His English failed him. He shrugged his shoulders, and said "Sabbey?"

"Sabbey plenty," said Nilssen. "Just get me a leadsman to work, Captain. If you're in a hurry, I'll skim the banks as close as I dare."

Rabeira called away a hand to heave the lead, and sent a steward for a bottle of wine and glasses. He even offered camp stools, which, naturally, the pilots did not use. In fact, he brimmed with affableness and hospitality.

From the first moment of his stepping on to the bridge, Kettle began to learn the details of his new craft. As each sandbar showed up beneath the yellow ripples, as each new point of the forest-clad banks opened out, Nilssen gave him courses and cross bearings, dazing enough to the unprofessional ear, but easily stored in a trained seaman's brain. He discoursed in easy slang of the cut-offs, the currents, the sludge-shallows, the floods, and the other vagaries of the great river's course, and punctuated his discourse with draughts of Rabeira's wine, and comments on the tangled mass of black humanity under the forecastle-head awning.

"There's something wrong with those passenger boys," he kept on repeating. And another time: "Guess those niggers yonder are half mad with funk about something."

But Rabeira was always quick to reassure him. "Now dey lib for Congo, dey not like the idea of soldier-palaver. Dere was nothing more the matter with them but leetle sickness."

"Oh! it's recruits for the State Army you're bringing, is it?" asked Kettle.

"If you please," said Rabeira cheerfully. "Slaves is what you English would call dem. Laborers is what dey call demselves."

Nilssen looked anxiously at his new assistant. Would he have any foolish English sentiment against slavery, and make a fuss? Nilssen, being a man of peace, sincerely hoped not. But as it was, Captain Kettle preserved a grim silence. He had met the low-caste African negro before, and knew that it required a certain amount of coercion to extract work from him. But he did notice that all the Portuguese on board were armed like pirates, and were constantly on the qui vive, and judged that there was a species of coercion on this vessel which would stick at very little.

The reaches of the great beer-colored river opened out before them one after another in endless vistas, and at rare places the white roofs of a factory showed amongst the unwholesome tropical greenery of the banks. Nilssen gave names to these, spoke of their inhabitants as friends, and told of the amount of trade in palm-oil and kernels which each could be depended on to yield up as cargo to the ever-greedy steamers. But the attention of neither of the pilots was concentrated on piloting. The unrest on the forecastle-head was too obvious to be overlooked.

Once, when the cackle of negro voices seemed to point to an immediate outbreak, Rabeira gave an order, and presently a couple of cubical green boxes were taken forward by the ship's Krooboys, broken up, and the square bottles which they contained, distributed to greedy fingers.

"Dashing 'em gin," said Nilssen, looking serious. "Guess a Portugee's in a bad funk before he dashes gin at four francs a dozen to common passenger boys. I've a blame' good mind to put this vessel on the ground--by accident--and go off in the gig for assistance, and bring back a State launch."

"Better not risk your ticket," said Kettle. "If there's a row, I'm a bit useful in handling that sort of cattle myself."

Nilssen eyed wistfully a swirl of the yellow water which hid a sandbar, and, with a sigh, gave the quartermaster a course which cleared it. "Guess I don't like ructions myself," he said. "Hullo, what's up now? There are two of the passenger boys getting pushed off the forecastle-head by their own friends on to the main deck."

"They look a mighty sick couple," said Kettle, "and their friends seem very frightened. If this ship doesn't carry a doctor, it would be a good thing if the old man were to start in and deal out some drugs."

It seemed that Rabeira was of the same opinion. He went down to the main deck, and there, under the scorching tropical sunshine, interviewed the two sick negroes in person, and afterwards administered to each of them a draught from a blue glass bottle. Then he came up, smiling and hospitable and perspiring, on to the bridge, and invited the pilots to go below and dine. "Chop lib for cabin," said he; "palm-oil chop, plenty-too-much-good. You lib for below and chop. I take dem ship myself up dis next reach."

"Well, it is plain, deep water," said Nilssen, "and I guess you sabbey how to keep in the middle as well as I do. Come along, Kettle."

The pair of them went below to the baking cabin and dined off a savory orange-colored stew, and washed it down with fiery red wine, and dodged the swarming, crawling cockroaches. The noise of angry negro voices came to them between whiles through the hot air, like the distant chatter of apes.

The Dane was obviously ill at ease and frightened; the Englishman, though feeling a contempt for his companion, was very much on the alert himself, and prepared for emergencies. There was that mysterious something in the atmosphere which would have bidden the dullest of mortals prepare for danger.

Up they came on deck again, and on to the bridge. Rabeira himself was there in charge, dark, smiling, affable as ever.

Nilssen looked sharply down at the main deck below. "Hullo," said he, "those two niggers gone already? You haven't shifted them down below, I suppose?"

The Portuguese Captain shrugged his shoulders. "No," he said, "it was bad sickness, an' dey died an' gone over the side. I lose by their passage. I lose also the two fire-bar which I give for funeral palaver. Ver' disappointing."

"Sudden kind of sickness," said Nilssen.

"Dis sickness is. It make a man lib for die in one minute, clock time. But it don' matter to you pilot, does it? You lib for below--off duty--dis las' half hour. You see nothing, you sabby nothing. I don'-want no trouble at Boma with doctor palaver. I make it all right for you after. Sabby?"

"Oh, I tumble to what you're driving at, but I was just thinking out how it works. However, you're captain of this ship, and if you choose not to log down a couple of deaths, I suppose it's your palaver. Anyway, I don't want to cause no ill-will, and if you think it's worth a dash, I don't see why I shouldn't earn it. It's little enough we pick up else in this service, and I've got a wife at home in Liverpool who has to be thought about."

Kettle drew a deep breath. "It seems to me," he said, looking very hard at the Portuguese, "that those men died a bit too sudden. Are you sure they were pukka dead when you put them over the side?"

"Oh, yes," said Rabeira smilingly, "an' dey made no objection. It was best dey should go over quick. Bodies do not keep in this heat. An' pilot, I do you square-a, same as with Nilssen. You shall have your dash when doctor-palaver set."

"No," said Kettle, "you may keep it in your own trousers, Captain. Money that you've fingered, is a bit too dirty for me to touch."

"All right," said Rabeira with a genial shrug, "so much cheaper for me. But do not talk on the beach, dere's good boy, or you make trouble-palaver for me."

"I'll shut my head if you stop at this," said Kettle, "but if you murder any more of those poor devils, I'll see you sent to join them, if there's enough law in this State to rig a gallows."

The Portuguese did not get angry. On the contrary, he seemed rather pleased at getting what he wanted without having to bribe for it, and ordered up fresh glasses and another bottle of wine for the pilots' delectation. But this remained untouched. Kettle would not drink himself, and Nilssen (who wished to be at peace with both sides) did not wish to under the circumstances.

To tell the truth, the Dane was beginning to get rather scared of his grim-visaged little companion; and so, to prevent further recurrence to unpleasant topics, he plunged once more into the detail of professional matters. Here was a grassy swamp that was a deep water channel the year before last; there was a fair-way in the process of silting up; there was a mud-bar with twenty-four feet, but steamers drawing twenty-seven feet could scrape over, as the mud was soft. The current round that bend raced at a good eleven knots. That bank below the palm clump was where an Italian pilot stuck the M'poso for a month, and got sent to upper Congo (where he was eaten by some rebellious troops) as a recompense for his blunder.

Almost every curve of the river was remembered by its tragedy, and had they only known it, the steamer which carried them for their observation had hatching within her the germs of a very worthy addition to the series.

More trouble cackled out from the forecastle-head, and more of the green gin cases were handed up to quell it. The angry cries gradually changed to empty boisterous laughter, as the raw potato spirit soaked home; and the sullen, snarling faces melted into grotesque, laughing mask