Jack Book Two in the Trilogy: Murder on the High Seas

The Captain: Part 4

Captain Pendleton had transported slaves only twice previously. He did not like it. His first transport as captain was during a time when he needed money. He told himself it would be the last slave transport for him. He told himself he objected to slavery on moral grounds. But it did not end there. He needed money again. At that first experience of the realities of slave transport back in 1853, he shipped 45 Negroes from Jamaica to Charleston as a favor for a wealthy friend. Although he was handsomely paid, the captain felt he had no real participation in that transaction because his friend had purchased them and, one way or the other, that shipment of slaves was going to Charleston to be sold.

Now he dreamed of having his own ship to do with as he pleased. He was tired of seeing all of the profits go to the stockholders. He never had enough money. He always had been at their beck and call. If he could only buy and sell one big shipment of Negroes, he could purchase the vessel and make so much money with it that he'd never have to do something sinister like that again. And he could even make it up to the negroes, he told himself nights when his conscience complained. But the slaves he could purchase cheaply in Cuba he could sell dearly in Charleston. Just once more. Then he'd be free to do as he pleased.

But like the last time, he knew some of the slaves would die during the passage. He couldn't let that deter him. He tried to block it out. With war on the horizon between the South and North, the captain told himself there were larger problems to deal with.

And he saw an opportunity to make millions - not with selling slaves but with blockade-running. Pendleton was sure that the northern ships would bottle up the southern ports like Charleston, Norfolk and New Orleans. Enterprising men could make their fortunes. Running cotton out and arms into these ports would be a quick path to enormous wealth. But he needed to buy the ship from its Dutch owners first. They wanted to sell it to him as it was aging, and they wanted to buy new ships for their merchant fleet. The corporation's policy was that its fleet of ships should never trade in human cargo and it prohibited its captains from doing so. It mainly dealt in hemp, sugar, cotton, rum and coffee or whatever goods merchants needed to ship either long distances or from island to island in the Caribbean Sea. On occasion ships in the fleet transported arms.

Captain Pendleton needed only $12,000 more to have enough for a good down payment on the vessel which, if war came, he would need to outfit with cannons at another huge expense. There was only one way he could think of to make the money quickly and that was buying slaves as cheap as possible in Havana or at another slave-trading Caribbean island and selling them for $1000 to as much as $1800 (about $40,000 to $46,000 in today's currency) a head in Charleston.

He knew an auctioneer, a Mr. Jeremiah Jones, who would not only handle the sale for a hefty fee of one-fifth of the profits but who was also an investor and one who would assure the captain's anonymity in the transaction. The captain wanted to ship only forty Negroes but the corpulent Mr. Jones, who had long stringy gray hair but bald on top of his head, insisted on one hundred and ten slaves aboard. His argument was sound: why risk more than one transport? The more transports one had to make the more chances that the federal authorities would intercept the ship and they would lose everything.

So the captain relented - the profits would indeed be much larger - but he feared for the darkies who would have to undergo a long journey in very cramped, filthy quarters. They would have to be packed naked, chained to the floorboards, into the new below-deck compartments which would be built in Jamaica. It was planned to be four feet high, twenty feet wide and one hundred feet long.

Mr. Jones said their losses in diseased or dead Negroes would likely be about fifteen per cent. Still, Mr. Jones would get his hefty cut. Captain Pendleton had long stopped thinking about if he should make the transport and instead had been planning on how he would do it with the minimum discomfort for the slaves.

But Captain Pendleton's chief problem now was not the Negroes. No, he had done whatever he could up until now to ease their plight. It was how to deal with the new crew members including, so unexpectedly, that rabble-rouser, Whittemore, who, the captain considered, was intent on spoiling his plans.

"He hoodwinked me, he did, by coming aboard and signing up under false pretenses. "How did Jones ever find him again anyway?" Pendleton thought. "What a disaster! I can lose it all. Jones insisted we needed him to preach the gospel of slavery. I didn't like it one bit and told him so. I went along against my better judgment. It's plain to see now," he reflected, "that this man is a wolf in sheep's clothing - an abolitionist and the worst kind of abolitionist, one who once preached about the goodness of the institution of slavery and now sings the opposite tune. Last time there were only 45 slaves and the ship easily accommodated them in the aft section below deck. This time a new deck would have to be built below to accommodate 110."

On the captain's first slave transport, he bought the crew's silence with a gallon of rum each and extra liberty in Kingston, Jamaica. Of course he bought the rum in Jamaica as it was very cheap there.

In Cuba there would be a day or two - maybe three - of liberty. No more. They'd dock at the harbor in Santiago, unload the cargo, board the new cargo, and get out quickly. That was the plan. It had to be done night when it would be less likely that an agent from the company would be about and when it would be easier to slip out of Cuban waters without being seen by United States vessels seeking to stop slavers and confiscate their cargo, fining the owners which would no doubt cause great problems for Pendleton and which, could ruin everything, he thought. No. There was no margin for error in this dastardly business. He knew he had to take care of the rabble rouser, Whittemore.

What Pendleton did not know was that Jack and I were watching master's back.