Bootleg Blacks

ADVENTURES or AN AFRICAN SLAVER, Being a True Account of the Life of Captain Theodore Canot, Trader in Gold, Ivory & Slaves on the Coast of Guinea: His Own Story as told in the Year 1854 to Brantz Mayer & Now Edited with an Introduction by Malcolm Cowley--A. & C. Bom ($4).

A derelict sea-captain, cadging drinks on the Baltimore wharves (according to the present editor), accosted one Brantz Mayer, swapped yarns for liquor. The captain, the accosted, the yarns, are all of a piece with garrulous South African traders who peddle reminiscence with their kitchenware. In pleasant 19th century cadences Mayer sets down the story of this Canot, Italian by birth, American by adoption, who sailed the last legal slaver before the trade was outlawed. Forced thereafter to bootleg his valuable black cargo, he practiced the proverbial sardine economy of space in his barracoon, packing his human loot spoon fashion, so that each wretch lay curved in his neighbor's lap.

But never did Canot resort to the measure of a fellow 'legger. The law read that a slaver suspect could not be confiscated unless at the time of capture there were actually slaves aboard. That a slaver could be smelled "five miles down the wind" made camouflage the more difficult, and upon such a reeking suspect four war-vessels one day descended. Fortunately for the suspect captain, the law was becalmed long enough for him to drop his 600 slaves overboard, chained to the anchor.

Such fate was nevertheless preferable to the treatment the blacks would have suffered as convicts or prisoners-of-war in Africa. Prisoners were put to slow torture and mutilation at the hands of the captor and his wives, vicious harpies who neatly carved out eyes, skinned off lips, and with sharp nails clawed out brains--succulent delicacy for the night's banquet. Convicts were killed by their own parents. In (none too authentic) pidgin English, dusky King Holiday confided to a client whose "factories" he kept well stocked with slaves: "All captains come to river tell me you king and you big mans stop we trade, and s'pose dat true, what we do? ... We law is, s'pose some of we child go bad and we no can sell 'em, we father must kill dem own child. And s'pose trade be done, we must kill too much child same way."