“That’s so,” I admitted, “but we’ve been out East for three years and I’m anxious to get back to England. I came around this way thinking we might pick up a cargo, but there’s not much doing.” “It looks as though there had been something doing,” he exclaimed a few minutes later, when he saw the number of men we had on board. “What in thunder are you doing with so many men?” “We had three ships out East,” I explained. “I sold the others to the Japs. The crews did not want to stay with them. When they signed I agreed to return them to England, and I am taking them back myself, rather than pay their passage; that’s all.” He looked skeptical, but asked no further questions along that line, except to inquire the names of the ships I had sold and their rig. The moment he poked his nose in the hold and sniffed the air he turned on me and declared, with an air of finality, “You’ve been running slaves.” “Nothing like it,” I replied, just as positively. “There were a lot of niggers at the Mauritius who wanted to get to Delagoa Bay and as we were going there I took them along, at two shillings a head. They grubbed themselves and most of them lived down here, as we were crowded above. If I had known they would stink the ship up so I wouldn’t have carried them at any price.” “That’s the regular slave smell,” he insisted, apparently by no means convinced by my calm statement. “Your craft isn’t fitted up as though you had to transport niggers to keep you in coal.” “I don’t make a business of it,” I told him, “but I’ve got to carry something besides two extra crews, or lose money.” Without continuing the argument, his silence adding to my apprehension, he went on over the ship and examined every foot of it. He found nothing to strengthen the suspicions I was convinced he had formed, but he had already seen, and smelled, enough to make me uncomfortable. The moment the young officer’s launch was clear of us we got under way at full speed. He had to row only a couple of hundred yards to the gunboat and we had not gone a mile before a shot was fired after us as a signal to heave to again. Evidently the commander of the warship, as soon as he heard the lieutenant’s report, had decided to hold us on suspicion, but we had no idea of being held. It was dark by that time and, as we showed no lights, the gunboat could not pursue us, nor could she tell which way to shoot. We saw her lights trailing us for a while, but she soon gave up the chase.