The Reckoning Read online

  The

  RECKONING

  A Slave Shipwreck Saga

  Michael Smorenburg

  First published in the United States of America by CreateSpace in 2017.

  Copyright © Michael Smorenburg, 2017

  All rights of Michael Smorenburg to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1998.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

  Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

  Some of the concepts and quotations expressed in this fictional tale first appeared, some in a different form, in various print or electronic expressions by the originators, authors or presenters so named.

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  www.MichaelSmorenburg.com/Reckoning

  FaceBook.com/MichaelSmorenburg

  [email protected]

  House of Qunard Publishing

  Copyright © 2017 Michael Smorenburg & Qunard Publishing

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN Hardback—978-0-6399153-1-9

  ISBN Paperbacks—978-0-6399153-2-6

  ISBN eBook—978-0-6399153-0-2

  ISBN Audio book—978-0-6399153-3-3

  Book Front Cover Photo Credit, Copyright ©: Neil Phillips, 2017

  DEDICATION

  For Francois.

  The man who found the original shipwreck.

  That wreck turned out to be São José Paquete de Africa, foundered on the rocks at Clifton in Cape Town, 1794.

  It did not have the gold aboard that we sought but it had a story and legacy infinitely more valuable.

  The Reckoning

  Based as it is on facts, this work remains a tale of fiction. Names, characters, places and many incidents are products of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Also by Michael Smorenburg:

  The Praying Nun—Qunard Publishing—2017

  The Manhattan Event—Qunard Publishing—2018

  Ragnarok—Qunard Publishing—2017

  LifeGames—Qunard Publishing—1995 & 2016

  A Trojan Affair—Qunard Publishing—2016

  The Everything Sailing Book Part 2—Adams Media 1999

  The Everything Sailing Book Part 1—Adams Media 1998

  Business Buyer’s Kit—Career Press 1997

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This is a fictional account that was inspired by a true story.

  A tragedy.

  In 1794 a slave ship, São José—Paquete de Africa, was wrecked along the coast near Cape Town in South Africa. Four hundred slaves were in her holds.

  Half that number perished that day.

  The survivors were rounded up and marched into town where they were sold to recover costs.

  Let us first pause here a moment to remember all four-hundred nameless lives wasted.

  That story is already told in the prequel to this novella, “The Praying Nun—A Slave Shipwreck Saga”.

  To their masters, these slaves were not humans. They were chattel—mere assets.

  As such, nobody cared to record their whereabouts or their individual stories. The best we can do is to infer from the general records how their lives may have unfolded.

  This story gives a name and ordeal to one of them.

  _________

  The period in which this story is set was a tumultuous and confusing epoch in the colonies. The French Revolution had created global turmoil and the Dutch East India Company, afraid of seeing the friendly port at the Cape of Good Hope fall into the French enemy hands, requested English help.

  An English fleet came ashore and after a brief skirmish with the local Dutch authorities, unaware that the invading force had been directed by their masters in Holland, the English took over the administration in the colony. This invasion was never intended to be permanent. Roman Dutch law and its existing administrators proceeded as before, but under the scrutiny of the British overlords, without those new rulers actively applying English law.

  In order to tame this story and avoid its narrative and appeal becoming unnecessarily bogged down by this tangle of confusion, I have taken the liberty of shifting the domestic facts and actual timelines. I have introduced real life figures drawn from history and imported them into these pages. Where it was necessary to make adjustments to actual historical timelines and prominent persons featured, I have aimed to retain the prevailing mood and mores of the time that they presented.

  _________

  Thank you to darling Kirstin Engelbrecht for your tireless line-by-line edits and putting up with me in all ways.

  A massive thank you to my brilliant editor, Karolyn Herrera for a sterling job.

  For this cover, matched as it is to my other three titles, I give special thanks to Southern Stiles Designs and Gemma Poppet for her creativity and astounding work ethic. And I thank Neil Phillips for the use of the cover photo, necessarily edited as it had to be.

  Thanks to all proof-readers and especially my good friend, Carel Hauptfleisch who always motivates me just when I think it’s a waste of time.

  Thanks to all who have given me so much encouragement to keep writing.

  KARMA.

  We all accept that the human brain is more complex by far than an ordinary computer of the 1980s. Yet the lowliest computer of 1980 could, in one millisecond, extract from the few simple lines we call a barcode, a vast library of information—price, producer, batch, etc.

  How much more can a brain read from the mask we wear, from our gait, and from a tone of voice?

  These things—our expression, the furrows of our face, our bearing and more, are written into us over decades. The scribes of these things are our experiences and thoughts—and these thoughts are in turn read by others who reinforce everything that we become.

  Today, at least where constitutions bridle the behavior of those with power, we enjoy some measure of individuality and are mostly treated on merit. But, the history of our species was a place—and in some quarters, these circumstances remain—where individual rights was a meaningless term. We were born into circumstance and expected to bear whatever was dished out to us as the lot that one or another God had directed for us. We simply lived out a script written for us within the strictures and strata of hierarchy.

  We were said to have karma—good or bad luck resulting from our actions (in this or an earlier life).

  But is it luck?

  Some, in this book, chose a path that let them walk with dignity in spite of circumstance. In the fullness of time they wrote those internal efforts into their outward appearance and reaped the rewards.

  Chapter 1

  Cape of Good Hope, tip of Africa

  June/Winter, 1794

  Brittle as fine china, mussel shells baked colourless by countless African noons clinked and shattered under the heel of a boot.

  The sound of it yanked Chikunda to his feet.

  A rough club in his hand, he crouched like a knife-fighter covering his pregnant wife, terror coursing through his veins.

  “There’ll be no need for that,” the man with an unruly mop of coal black hair and glinting blue eyes rumbled in a coarse Portuguese dialect, the yawning mouth of his battered old blunderbuss aimed at Chikunda’s chest and a fawn-coloured mongrel, tall as his knee
, at his heel.

  The young pye-dog had a friendly demeanour and well-kept coat. One ear stood urgently to attention, the other only at half-mast, its attention keenly tuned to its master.

  The weapon in the stranger’s hands was swaying. The man was dangerously nervous, his ragged breathing betraying fear, or perhaps worse, excitement.

  “Put it down,” he ordered Chikunda.

  He was a small man, slight of build with hands as gnarled as the granite boulders strewn all around Chikunda’s makeshift encampment on the shell-littered beach.

  “You are the shipwreck survivors?” he accused, “from the slaver?”

  “Who are you? How do you know I speak Portuguese?” Chikunda challenged.

  “You’re in no position to negotiate, my friend,” the man said. A smile of respect started to grin through. “I’ve been watching you since you came ashore.”

  “Two moons?”

  “Two moons,” the man agreed. “Two months you’ve been here. Did you think you could stay like this forever? Here in my little paradise?” He paused. “Put that thing down and tell me your names.”

  The gun was still swaying.

  Chikunda’s woman had steadily crept around behind him, taking cover behind his legs.

  Since the sinking of their ship, the runaway slaves Chikunda and Mkiwa—or Faith, as she preferred to be called—had been holed up on this small rocky peninsula, subsisting on the bounties of the sea and drinking from the burbling brook of sweet clean water that this lucky place had provided.

  “I am Chikunda… my wife, Faith.”

  Gently, Chikunda set his club down beside Faith, knowing that she would have it back into his hand the instant he called for it—Pitisha! Pass it!—in their Swahili tongue.

  “Please don’t make me use this. Throw it further away, Faith,” the man ordered. “I’m not taking chances with a desperate man.”

  “What is it you want?” Chikunda challenged, as his wife did the man’s bidding, kicking the club out of reach as if it was a serpent.

  “Good. Thank you.” The blue eyes relaxed a little, taking the ancient shotgun away from his shoulder but still training it on Chikunda from four paces away. “What do I want?” the man repeated. “I’d think it would be obvious.”

  “Is there a reward?” Chikunda asked simply.

  This was a white man, a Portuguese white man. The slave ship that had marooned the couple here had been a Portuguese vessel; the port of Cape Town was only just over that nearby ridge.

  Things weren’t looking good.

  Lucky to survive the stormy tempest and under the cloak of darkness, the pair of fugitives had slipped away from the carnage of the shipwreck and found this secluded refuge. Well as it had treated them, it was a place hemmed in by geography, trapping them with steep cliffs to the north and a military garrison encamped near a beach to the south, with towering mountains to the east and a wild ocean to the west.

  When they’d come ashore, weeks of starvation, previous ill treatment, and vicious beatings had left them near death’s door.

  Only by Chikunda’s determination, God’s grace, and their prayers, had they survived and found this enclave of peace. They’d agreed that they’d need a month, perhaps two, to recover themselves sufficiently for the long trek that lay ahead if they were ever to reach home again.

  Now, right at the threshold of that deadline, this stranger had stumbled into the hidden camp.

  Mozambique was an unknown walking distance to the north. Sailing south in the stinking slave ship had taken 24 days, but there was no way to convert this to a return journey on foot. All they agreed upon was that they must try, but it would be a monumental task and they needed to be healthy first.

  It had been a race against time.

  The man had caught them unawares, relaxing in the late afternoon sun, somewhere between the high alert of the terrifying first days and the creeping complacency of a routine.

  The only other humans they’d seen were redcoats encamped in garrison across the water of the bay to their south.

  They’d also seen this shaggy-haired man foraging close by, but he had somehow never seemed to notice them.

  He appeared to be a man of habit and his frequent visits, except for today, had been quite predictable.

  It had been one moon since Faith had missed her monthly bleed when they’d been loaded aboard the wicked vessel, and it had been two more moons since then until now.

  She was now starting to show and the trip to escape would become increasingly perilous with each passing day of her pregnancy.

  Calculating the moment to make their break for it had plagued Chikunda… and now, it seemed, they had just run out of luck.

  “You’ve been watching me,” the man said, ignoring the question of reward. “And I’ve also been watching you.” He began to smile. “But you never knew it.”

  There was no ridicule in the smile, no cruelty. Quite the contrary; the man’s eyes seemed to moisten with emotion and the peculiar gentleness of someone who knows by experience the suffering of others.

  This meant one of two things—he was a friend or he was stark crazy.

  “Why wait two months?” Chikunda challenged. Fate had them in its icy grip; only courage under fire might let them go where it would lead and do so with dignity.

  “I had no need of it until now,” the man answered plainly, putting the scattergun down and holding his palms open to the couple to emphasize that he meant no threat. “You have not been at risk until now.”

  “Been at risk?”

  “Do you think I’m the only one who knows that where there is repeatedly smoke there must be a regular fire maker?”

  Chikunda instantly understood.

  “I have kept the fire small and only in the twilight in our cave facing the sea?” Chikunda defended with the intonation of a question, more in apology to Faith who had argued that they should make no fire at all.

  The man laughed, his eyes twinkling again and his dog seemed to relax with it too, and moved from his side, inspecting the site with its nose.

  “This is a dry land, prone to wild fires. So, everyone is always alert to the smell of smoke. The wind sometimes blows this way, or that…” He indicated the two bays on either side of the headland they were on. “And the fire watch at the garrison must be constantly vigilant for smoke on the wind.” He shrugged sadly.

  “You are here to arrest us?” Chikunda felt the need to bring the conversation to its head. To know their fate.

  “Arrest you? Me? On my own? Without shackles?” He asked it rhetorically and then squinted to answer. “Mind you, I would not have to share the reward then, and with that thing,” he said, indicating his rusting, ugly, old weapon lying in the grass, “you’ll go wherever I point you, no? And she’ll go where you go.”

  “If not arrest, then what?”

  The agony of having their fate drawn out like this was crippling.

  Faith has suffered enough, he thought. This was the moment he must make up his mind for fight or flight… or surrender.

  “A warning, my friend. I am sorry I have made you uncomfortable. This is not sport for me, but I needed to know your temperament. A caged man is a dangerous one, and I have a simple but pleasant life that I don’t wish to complicate.”

  “I’m not understanding,” Chikunda offered. “Why warn us?”

  “Because I too am a fugitive. You are a fugitive,” he shrugged. “We at least have that in common, eh?”

  “How does a fugitive know so much about the reward for another man?”

  “Because this is a British colony and I am a fugitive not from these masters, but from my own people, from the Portuguese. You are a fugitive from the Portuguese too.”

  Chikunda stood, dumbstruck, gaping at the man, suddenly feeling exhausted in the wake of certain doom having passed.

  “I think it unwise to waste time in more idle chatter,” suggested the man, picking up his weapon once more with his left hand and offering his righ
t hand in friendship. “I live yonder, across there.”

  He pointed in the direction of the smaller bay to the north of this headland, to a crease in the mountain slope directly above where the slave ship had wrecked and below a vast granite outcrop high on the mountain.

  “The Dutch were the masters here when I deserted my ship. They call the bay after me, Schoenmakers Gat, Cobblers Cave. I’m the shoemaker, Sebastião de Malagrida, most pleased to make your acquaintance.” He indicated the mutt and motioned with his head for it to follow, “Jack.”

  The dog’s ears went up and he trotted over with enthusiasm, whipping his tail furiously. Chikunda patted him.

  The two men broke off the prolonged handshake of comrades. “I can give you shelter… not for long, but for longer than you can safely stay here,” he promised. “Collect your stuff.”

  A short time later they were picking their way through the hardy scrub with its gnarled woody roots set into beach sand between the granite boulders.

  They came up onto the ridge of land that was the southern boundary to the shoemaker’s bay.

  There they paused a moment on the vast granite rock outcrop that stood taller than a ship’s mast at the southern headland of the bay. It formed the natural breakwater that had given shelter to the stricken slave ship as it limped in and wrecked on a rocky reef in the middle of that bay.

  “I watched the unfolding tale of your wreck,” Sebastião pointed, “from my vantage place up there.”

  He indicated again the small valley that ran down from the brooding mountain backdrop to the bay.

  “Why did you not come to our assistance?” Chikunda demanded, offering his hand to his wife to help her over a fracture between the rocks.

  “I could see it was a Portuguese ship,” Sebastião reminded him. “Their gratitude for my assistance would not surpass their lust to see my desertion punished,” he predicted. “I have a good enough life here and I’m not about to risk it. Almost not for anything.”