A Middy of the Slave Squadron | Page 7

trial of her crew upon the charge of
piracy, Captain Harrison, our skipper, busily employed himself, as was

his wont, in hunting up information relative to the movements, present
and prospective, of the slavers upon the coast. And this was not quite
so difficult to do as might at first be imagined; for, Sierra Leone being
the headquarters, so to speak, of the British Slave Squadron, the
persons actually engaged in the slave-trade found that it paid them well
to maintain agents there for the sole purpose of picking up every
possible item of information relative to the movements and doings of
that squadron. For it not unfrequently happened that, to those behind
the scenes, an apparently trivial and seemingly quite worthless bit of
information, an imprudent word dropped by an unwary officer
respecting one of our vessels, enabled the acute ones to calculate so
closely that they often succeeded in making a dash into some river,
shipping a cargo of slaves, and getting clear away to sea again only a
few hours before our cruisers put in an appearance on the spot. And in
the same way our own officers, by frequenting, in disguise, the haunts
of the slavers and their agents, very often succeeded in catching a hint
that, carefully followed up, led to most important captures being made.
It was, indeed, through a hint so acquired that we had been put upon the
track of the Dona Isabella.
Now, our own skipper, Captain Harrison, was particularly keen upon
this sort of work, and was exceptionally well qualified to achieve
success in it. For, in the first place, he was a West Indian by birth,
being the son of a Trinidad sugar-planter, and he consequently spoke
Creole Spanish as fluently as he did his mother tongue. Also his
physical characteristics were such as to be of the greatest assistance to
him in such enterprises; for he was tall, lean, and muscular, of swarthy
complexion, with thick, black, curly hair, and large, black, flashing
eyes, suggesting that he carried a touch of the tar-brush, although, as a
matter of fact, he had not a drop of negro blood in him. He was a man
of dauntless courage, knowing not the meaning of fear, and absolutely
revelling in situations of the most extreme peril, yet gifted with quite as
much discretion as was needful for a man entrusted with heavy
responsibilities involving the lives of many of his fellow-men. He
never sought danger for danger's sake alone, and never embarked in an
enterprise which his reason assured him was hopelessly impracticable,
but, on the other hand, he never hesitated to undertake the most

perilous task if he believed he could see a way to its successful
accomplishment. It was his habit to assume a variety of disguises in
which he would haunt the third and fourth rate taverns of Freetown,
especially patronised by the slave-dealing fraternity, and mingling
freely with these gentry, would boldly express his own views, adopted,
of course, for the occasion, upon the various matters affecting the trade,
or discuss with them the most promising schemes for baffling the
efforts of the British cruisers. He had noticed, very early in his career as
an officer of the Slave Squadron, that it was always the British who
constituted the bete noire of the slavers; the French they feared very
little; the Americans not at all.
These little incursions into the enemy's territory Captain Harrison
conducted with consummate boldness and skill, and with a
considerable measure of success, for it was quite a favourite
amusement of his to devise and suggest schemes of a particularly
alluring character which, when adopted by the enemy, he of course
triumphantly circumvented without difficulty. There was only one fault
to find with this propensity on the part of our skipper, but in my
humble judgment it constituted a serious one. It was this. Captain
Harrison's personality was a distinctly striking one; he was the kind of
man who, once seen, is not easily forgotten; and I greatly dreaded that
some day, sooner or later, the reckless frequenter of the low-class
Freetown taverns would be identified as one and the same with the
captain of H.M.S. Psyche, who was of course frequently to be seen
about the streets in the uniform of a British naval captain. Indeed I once
took the liberty of delicately hinting at this possibility; but the skipper
laughed at the idea; he had, it appeared, the most implicit faith in his
disguises, which included, amongst other things, a huge false
moustache of most ferocious appearance, and an enormous pair of gold
earrings.
We had been at Sierra Leone a little over a fortnight, and our business
there was just completed, when the skipper came aboard on a certain
afternoon in a state