Middle Passage

After forty-one days, the ship arrives and docks at Bagalang, a West African slave trading post, ending the first part of the journey of the Republic. Rutherford takes advantage of Falcon’s absence from the ship one night to bypass the booby traps and break into the captain’s cabin. Rutherford reads Falcon’s journals, which reveal Falcon’s early history. Falcon is the son of a Massachusetts minister and a highly educated woman who was very lonely after she married. She gave maps to her son and filled his head with stories of exploration.

Falcon, ashamed of his small size, decided that his only recourse was to grow up to outshine his very successful father. Falcon thrived during the American Revolution, but he despised how poorly the US managed the War of 1812, during which the British disrupted American shipping. Commissioned as a privateer, Falcon made money by moving contraband. Rutherford finds the man in these journal entries to be almost puritanical but lacking in virtue. Above all Falcon is a perfectionist who is plagued by “loneliness, self-punishment, and bouts of suicide” (51) as a result. The man is wellread, a dead shot, and paranoid that his crew plots to poison him. The last thing Rutherford reads in the journal is that Falcon’s cargo will include Allmuseri tribesmen and something so precious that it is worth “a king’s ransom in Europe” (53).

Falcon catches Rutherford rifling through his things when he comes back aboard the ship early after being jumped by six men whom he nearly kicked to death with his metal-toed boots. To Rutherford’s surprise, Falcon gives him a gun and a magnetic ring that will allow him to shoot the guns the captain keeps. Falcon also teaches Rutherford to check himself every few minutes to make sure he knows where all the weapons on his person are. Rutherford is to be Falcon’s spy on the crew, and Falcon shares the crew’s secrets in a conversation that makes Rutherford uncomfortable.

Rutherford is unable to sleep that night because of the things Falcon told him but also because of the cries of the Africans locked up in the barracoons (slave warehouses) on the shore. Rutherford learns later that night from Squibb that all anyone knows is that the cargo will be Allmuseri. Squibb also tells Rutherford about the dehumanizing preparation of slaves for sale.

The next day, Rutherford goes ashore to see the Allmuseri but hangs back in the shadows when Squibb warns him that a free black like Rutherford could very well be kidnapped and sold. When the Allmuseri arrive, Rutherford grows even more uneasy. They smell of “old temples” (61) and come from a civilization said to be older than Europe’s. Their culture and language are completely absent of abstraction, and they are “a clan distilled from the essence of everything that came earlier. Put another way, they might’ve been the Ur-tribe of humanity itself”—the first and eldest tribe of mankind (116). They were captured with ease only because drought and famine virtually destroyed their village.

Later, after Rutherford tells Cringle about the captain’s attempt to recruit him, Cringle warns Rutherford to stay away from Falcon because he has a death wish. “‘He will sink the ship and take us with him’” (63), says Cringle, and the thing he is bringing aboard the ship with the Allmuseri belongs to the tribe and should not be taken back to the outside world. Cringle even attempts to recruit Rutherford for a mutiny against the captain. Rutherford hesitates, so Cringle tells him he has just a little while to decide.

When the Allmuseri finally see the ship and the tiny, vermin-filled hole where they will be tightly packed, they panic. The Allmuseri think the Europeans are cannibals taking them to the New World for meat. They see Europeans as lost members of the Allmuseri tribe, people whose “failure to experience the Unity of Being everywhere” consigned them to the Allmuseri version of hell (65). Cringle shoots a tribesman who makes a grab for Falcon, a tribeswoman throws her baby overboard, and several others try to follow the baby down into the water. Falcon beats the tribes people bloody and lowers the men into the dark hold. Women are placed in the cabins, and children are placed in the longboats. The brutality brings out the first strands of white in Rutherford’s hair. He is livid with white-hot rage and thinks that a world where such things could happen is not one in which one can live or have children.

Falcon comes to Rutherford then and tells him they are about to set sail. Rutherford is to feed the cargo, and no one else aside from the captain is to have any contact with the Allmuseri. The thing the captain has stolen from the Allmuseri also has to be fed, but no one knows what it eats. When Tommy the cabin boy is sent down to feed it, he comes back speaking a mishmash of African languages he should not be able to speak.

A delirious Tommy tells the men that the creature is full of loathsome things. The creature has bewitched Tommy with a song, has washed his brain of everything, and has him so in its grasp that Tommy loses all sense of the boundaries of his self, his body. This is when the crew realizes that the thing eats people’s minds and experiences. Tommy undoubtedly will never be sane again. Cringle silences this talk and puts Tommy to bed.

The Republic departs on May 30 and makes good headway. On the fifteenth day, somewhere in the North Atlantic, the ship runs into rough weather. At times the ship moves into a thick, blinding fog and twists in the rough currents and big wind. The fear of the uncanny weather draws the crew closer together. Even Nathaniel Meadows, the rumored ax murderer, volunteers to do Rutherford’s laundry and that of the Allmuseri one day.

The ship takes on more and more water, swamping the hold where the tribes people are stowed. Falcon’s method for preventing revolt in the terrible conditions is to select one out of every ten prisoners for special favors and trustee roles indicated with Western clothing. Ngonyama, a young Allmuseri who befriends Rutherford, is not moved by these gestures. Rutherford notices that Ngonyama seems to be waiting for something. Rutherford teaches Ngonyama English and learns a few words of Allmuseri in exchange. Ngonyama helps Squibb and Rutherford with the cooking sometimes. Like all the Allmuseri, Ngonyama is unnerving. He can carve a pig without leaving a knife mark on it. Rutherford recognizes this “same quiet magic” (76) in every aspect of Allmuseri life.

Rutherford learns the tribe’s history and finds that they are not even of African origin. They settled long ago on the Indian subcontinent, then moved through each of the major ancient civilizations of the world. They are even responsible for the Brazilian martial art known as capoeira. Their spoken language is complicated, and their written language is pictographs and as such, observes Rutherford, not suited to empirical science in the Western tradition. Their ethics are such that if they wrong people, they fall ill.

Rutherford becomes responsible for a little girl, Baleka, after the girl’s mother reprimands him for giving her spoiled hardtack. Rutherford resigns himself to feeding the little girl from there on out.

On the afternoon of June 11, a violent storm nearly swamps the ship but leaves Ngonyama bone dry. The storm ends in a split second, spooking the crew and bringing many of them to their knees in spontaneous prayers of thanks. Ngonyama tells Rutherford shortly after that he and any friends of his should stay below deck the next noonday.

The crew is so unsettled by the weather and the strangeness of the Allmuseri that some men threaten to leave. When Cringle tries to silence the men with threats, the boatswain talks back to him, telling him that someone needs to stop Falcon before they are all killed. If Cringle will not do, someone else will.

Later that night, Rutherford, Baleka, and Squibb are joined by Cringle and other men who plan a mutiny. The men are suspicious of Rutherford because he is a stowaway with no stake in the ship. Looking at the quiet suspicion of the crew, Rutherford recognizes that they are just as much property as the slaves Rutherford grew up among.

One of the men recognizes that Rutherford wears one of Falcon’s rings and accuses Rutherford of disloyalty. Rutherford lies by claiming he stole the ring. This lie gives the men the idea that Rutherford is the perfect person to disable the captain’s traps and kill him. Cringle convinces the men that it would be better to just maroon the captain, much to the displeasure of the crew. They go along with him in the end. The meeting ends with a blood oath.

Rutherford, full of nerves, takes Falcon’s meal to him that night. When Falcon asks what Rutherford has learned through spying, Rutherford spills all the men’s secrets out of fear. Falcon, who believes that people are either followers or rulers, seems unworried by the plot. He tells Rutherford that the crew is so full of weak men that they will kill one another just as soon as Falcon is set adrift. Rutherford agrees to submit to Falcon’s plan to subdue the mutineers. Falcon assures him he will not kill the men, just take away their shares in the profits from the voyage. Rutherford, Falcon claims, will be richly rewarded once they sell the fabulous thing hidden on the ship. Falcon finally agrees to tell Rutherford what the thing below deck is

The thing below deck is a god, claims Falcon. It is as old as the Stone Age, holds the universe together while it is awake, and sleeps one night of the year when the Allmuseri stay awake to watch the universe for it. A quarter of the god’s energy sustains the universe, and the rest may be devoted to other universes, Falcon suspects.

The god is chatty, which made it easy for the trader who raided the Allmuseri village to find it. It presents itself using whatever face or personality is most likely to appeal to the person addressing it. They were able to chain the god because it is, for seconds at a time, not in flux and thus is a material being. It is a god with limits. It doesn’t understand space, time, geometry, or itself. It is omnipresent, so it cannot comprehend finite things like humans. It’s a trickster, too, and will take away a man’s reason without the man even knowing it. Falcon believes the god will make him rich and grant him a place in the history books. Rutherford is shocked to learn that Falcon is immune to the god’s powers. After commanding Rutherford once again to tell no one, Falcon dismisses Rutherford by ordering him to find out what is making the dogs bark so wildly.

As he leaves the cabin, Rutherford is terrified. If God shows up, that can mean only that the apocalypse has arrived and that history will end. Outside the cabin, Rutherford discovers why the dogs are barking. Meadows, the ax murderer, is systematically teaching the dogs to attack Cringle, Rutherford, and the Allmuseri by beating the dogs while Meadows wears the clothes and does pitch-perfect imitations of each of these people. Rutherford is unable to puzzle out the full meaning of Meadows’s actions. He knows these actions can only mean that the ship is a “coffin” (105) and that Falcon is prepared to kill the mutineers and the Allmuseri. Rutherford cannot understand why Falcon would target him, however.

Rutherford is not sure of how to get out of this mess and to whom he owes loyalty, but he suspects he is the person most likely to be able to control the outcome.

When Rutherford goes back to the galley, he discovers that Baleka has a fever and has spots on her arms like one of the men who came down earlier. Rutherford tells Squibb the story of how Jackson cheated him out of his inheritance. Riley Calhoun, their father, ran away, leaving behind his family. Riley was caught and killed shortly after his escape, and Rutherford never forgave him. Their mother died soon after. Jackson, the eldest by eight years and already very conscientious, stayed in slavery to take care of Rutherford, who describes himself as Jackson’s “shadow-self, the social parasite, the black picklock and worldling—in whom[Jackson] saw, or said he saw, [their] runaway father” (113).

On the day Peleg Chandler, the Calhouns’ owner, was about to die, the owner asked Jackson what he should give the Calhouns, whom he saw as sons. Instead of asking their owner to make the Calhouns his heirs, Jackson asked Chandler to divide his estate equally among all of his slaves and to give the rest to Oberlin College. Believing his brother had given away his birthright, Rutherford eventually left Illinois and was estranged from his brother from then on.

Later that evening, Rutherford approaches Ngonyama to ask if the Allmuseri are capable of setting sail to Africa and if they are willing to leave the crew unharmed if Rutherford frees them. When Ngonyama agrees to this plan, Rutherford gives him a key that he thinks will open their chains.