Читать книгу Flashman and the Redskins - George Fraser MacDonald - Страница 11

In May, 1848, Flashman was forced to flee England after a card scandal, and sailed for Africa on the Balliol College, a ship owned by his father-in-law, John Morrison of Paisley, and commanded by Captain John Charity Spring, MA, late Fellow of Oriel College. Only too late did Flashman discover that the ship was an illegal slave-trader and her captain, despite his academic antecedents, a homicidal eccentric. After taking aboard a cargo of slaves in Dahomey, the Balliol College crossed the Atlantic, but was captured by the American Navy; Flashman managed to escape in New Orleans, and took temporary refuge in a bawdy-house whose proprietress, a susceptible English matron named Susan Willinck, was captivated by his picaresque charm.

Thereafter Flashman spent several eventful months in the Mississippi valley, frequently in headlong flight. For a time he impersonated (among many other figures) a Royal Navy officer; he was also a reluctant agent of the Underground Railroad which smuggled escaped slaves to Canada, but unfortunately the fugitive entrusted to his care was recognised by a vindictive planter named Omohundro, and Flashman abandoned his charge and beat a hasty retreat over the rail of a steamboat. He next obtained employment as a plantation slave-driver, but lost his position on being found in compromising circumstances with his master’s wife. He subsequently stole a beautiful octoroon slave, Cassy, sold her under a false name, assisted her subsequent evasion, and with the proceeds of the sale fled with her across the ice-floes of the Ohio River, pursued by slave-catchers who shot him in the buttock; however, he succeeded in effecting his escape, and Cassy’s, with the timely assistance of the then Congressman Abraham Lincoln.

With charges of slave-trading, slave-stealing, false pretences, and even murder hanging over his head, Flashman was now anxious to return to England. Instead, mischance brought him again to New Orleans, and he was driven in desperation to seek the help of his former commander, Captain Spring, who had been cleared of slave-trading by a corrupt American court and was about to sail. Flashman, who throughout his misfortunes had clung tenaciously to certain documents from the Balliol College – documents proving the ship’s slaving activities with which Flashman had hoped to blackmail his detested father-in-law – now offered them as the price of his passage home; Captain Spring, his habitual malevolence tempered by his eagerness to secure papers so dangerous to himself, agreed.

At this point, with our exhausted narrator quaking between the Scylla of United States justice and Charybdis in the person of the diabolic Spring, the third packet of the Flashman Papers ended – and the next chapter of his American adventure begins.