Free The Viceroy of Ouidah by Bruce Chatwin Page B

bicorn with a cockade of parrot plumes. Whenever they passed through the town, he would stride ahead of the hammockeers, clanging an iron bell and shouting, ‘Ago! Ago!’ to clear the path.
    He slept on a mat outside his master’s room. He cooked and tasted his food, controlled his drinking habits and emptied his slop-pail. He found girls for his bed, aphrodisiacs if the weather was exceptionally sticky, and warned him not to make lasting attachments.
    Francisco Manoel would use the same girl for a night or two, then send her home with a present for her family.
    His profits — and reputation for straight dealing — exasperated the veterans of the Trade. One year, a Captain Pedro Vicente begged him for a shipload of slaves without money or goods to pay. He swore to return but squandered the proceeds in Bahia and did not come back. Some time later, on hearing that the same man was in Lagos with an unseaworthy ship and a mutinous crew, Da Silva sent his cutter with a message: ‘Come over to Ouidah and I will refit you. Nobody cheats me twice.’
    Nor was he less straightforward in his dealings with the King.
    The two men never met: a taboo forbade Dahomean monarchs setting eyes on the sea. But if the King wanted twelve gilt chairs, they were sent. If he wanted twenty plumed hats, these were found. And he even got his greyhounds, which came specially from England — though, on their way up to Abomey, the dog was bitten by a rabid bitch.
    Every month or so an invitation came for Francisco Manoel to visit the capital. He would read each letter through and politely decline: on the first one, the King’s Portuguese scribe had written a warning in the margin:
    â€˜I, Antonio Maciel, have been sixteen years a prisoner of this cruel king without seeing another of my countrymen ...’
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    THE KING WENT to war in January and the chain-gangs started reaching Ouidah towards the end of March.
    The captives were numb with fright and exhaustion. They had seen their homes burned and their chiefs slaughtered. Iron collars chafed their necks. Their backs were striped purple with welts; and when they saw the white man’s ships, they knew they were going to be eaten.
    The Dahomeans’ mindless cruelty offended Da Silva’s sense of economy. Time and again, he complained to the Yovogan that the guards were ruining valuable property, but the old man sighed and said, ‘It is their custom.’
    On arriving at the Fort, the slaves were housed in a long shed, roofed with dried grasses and fenced in with a palisade of sharpened stakes. Each was manacled to an iron chain that ran in bights down the length of the structure. The thatch came lower than a man’s waist and, when the buyers peered in out of the sunlight, all they could see were eyes in the darkness.
    Every morning, after the Angelus, they were fed from a cauldron of millet gruel and driven to the lagoon where they washed and danced for exercise.
    Taparica cured the sick and calmed their fears: in a dozen dialects he would burble of their country-to-be where everyone danced and cigars grew on trees. He taught his master to distinguish the various tribes by their cicatrices. He could tell any man’s age by the state of his gums; and if in doubt, would lick his checks to test the resilience of his stubble.
    The loading was done in the cool of the evening, when the sea was down — the same scene repeated year after year: the ship, the waves, the black canoes, the black men shorn of their breechclouts, and the slave-brands heating in driftwood fires.
    Francisco Manoel preferred to do the branding himself, taking care to dip the red-hot iron in palm-oil to stop it sticking to the flesh.
    The chains were struck off at the water’s edge, so that, in the event of capsize, one man would not drag the others down. Only occasionally, in a final bid for freedom, would one fling himself to the breakers; if, later, his