The Ballad of Baccy Darke
Imagine, when I disembarked
that dank November night,
and caught a glimpse of Baccy Darke
on the foggy quay! How stark
he stared beneath the light,
face whiter than a winding sheet,
blood clotted on his throat,
while something poured down Nelson Street,
and scuttered, squeaking, round his feet
and delved into his coat.
A brandy at the Ship, or two,
helped exorcise the ghost;
and then another one or two,
for fear he’d come to fetch me to
damnation's burning coast.
Baccy’s treble once had sung
the praise of his Redeemer
till Ebenezer’s roof had rung.
Yet did that innocent become
a murderous blasphemer,
a cheat, a shabby racketeer;
that pet of Sunday School
set for a promising career,
became before his eighteenth year
a blot on Liverpool.
To purge a debt he stuck a man,
and took himself to flee
his mother and his motherland;
enlisted on Leviathan
bound for a warmer sea.
Only beyond the Mersey's pale,
as billowed swells increased
and breezes bellied out the sail,
he felt secure before a gale
that freshened from the east.
Advancement was a sly affair.
From hold to quarter deck
he sought preferment everywhere
and won command with not a care
for other men’s respect.
Plundering new realms of gold
that called across the waves,
at more than market price he sold
the cargo in his fetid hold,
tobacco leaf, and slaves;
for Captain Darke, with growing greed,
brought from Virginia
payloads of sought-after weed
to Liverpool, then with all speed
returned to Africa
and plied the middle passage west
with captive merchandise
of native peoples dispossessed
from Mountains of the Lioness.
He was in paradise:
more slaves meant more tobacco, so
plantations wanted slaves.
As keenly as the trade winds blow
he ferried hundreds, chained below,
already in their graves.
Until, one terrible July,
becalmed off the Azores,
wastage seemed unduly high,
too many slaves began to die.
Effect betrayed its cause:
bubonic wildfire overspread
his precious human hoard.
The dying shackled to the dead
from the gunwale dropped like lead,
discarded overboard.
Cadaverous officers and men,
from their infected keel
pitched out a comrade now and then
with paternoster and amen;
no helmsman at the wheel,
no navigator, saw-bones, cook,
and ratings all so weak
they scarce could hoist the yellow jack;
and everywhere, no-one mistook
that maddening, scuttering squeak.
The ship stole forward silently
without the aid of men,
and foundered in an islet’s lee
where slaves and Baccy's company
all met an equal end.
Rats alone were left alive
to gorge upon the dead.
Briefly, briefly they survived
and in their myriads they died –
but not before they'd bred.
Time passed. Then came that grim surprise
when we put in by chance
to take on water and supplies:
a barque I knew lay half capsized
and destitute of hands.
Though forty days could scarce have lapsed,
a party went aboard.
Baccy's corpse we found at last
sprawled beneath the mizzen mast,
well and truly gnawed.
Try though I might, I can't forget.
No man of us could speak.
In eerie calm we held our breath
to spare ourselves the stench of death.
Deserted timbers creaked.
Then burst a mangy cataract
into the heart of things,
a squeaking, scuttering tide of rats,
overwhelming, black as black,
like a lifetime's sins,
that threw themselves impulsively
in feverish commotion
from the decks of devilry,
to seek their own delivery
in the breaking ocean.
Two deck-hands played the undertaker,
I a makeshift priest.
But Baccy, in God’s lonely acre
left together with his Maker,
does he rest in peace?
The Atlantic heaved and rolled like thunder
on the voyage home.
A bulkhead cracked and burst asunder.
Gods! We thought we'd all go under,
swamped in bitter foam.
And then, at last, what did I see
when we made fast to land?
Baccy’s phantom on the quay,
enduring death eternally!
And now I understand:
he haunts me, he is warning me,
he proffers me a sign.
For I am guilty, as was he.
I prospered too, immorally:
Baccy’s trade was mine.
A hardened sinner of the seas,
now vision is restored
I beg forgiveness on my knees.
But one without remorse receives
a comfortless reward:
six feet of consecrated ground.
Does he know I pray
for him beneath that earthen mound?
Can Ebenezer’s hymns resound
two thousand miles away?
Martin Briggs only began writing in earnest after retiring from a career in public administration, since when his work has appeared in various periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic. He lives in Suffolk, England.
Pulsebeat Poetry Journal 