On
board, except for her captain, and a Finn who acted as engineer, Everett
was the only other white man. The black crew and "wood-boys" he soon
disliked intensely. At first, when Nansen, the Danish captain, and the
Finn struck them, because they were in the way, or because they were
not, Everett winced, and made a note of it. But later he decided the
blacks were insolent, sullen, ungrateful; that a blow did them no harm.
According to the unprejudiced testimony of those who, before the war, in
his own country, had owned slaves, those of the "Southland" were always
content, always happy. When not singing close harmony in the
cotton-fields, they danced upon the levee, they twanged the old banjo.
But these slaves of the Upper Congo were not happy. They did not dance.
They did not sing. At times their eyes, dull, gloomy, despairing,
lighted with a sudden sombre fire, and searched the eyes of the white
man. They seemed to beg of him the answer to a terrible question. It was
always the same question. It had been asked of Pharaoh. They asked it of
Leopold. For hours, squatting on the iron deck-plates, humped on their
naked haunches, crowding close together, they muttered apparently
interminable criticisms of Everett.
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