It's not that this is the only thing that happens in 1828, but I'll get to the other things later.
September 13, 1828
Aboard HMS Ocean Guard
off Cape Canaveral
“Guv’nor?” said Will, spyglass in hand. “You need to see this.”
Governor MacCarthy was already having a bad day.
The schooner Ocean Guard, built at Trafalgar this summer, was making decent time around the peninsula considering how little wind there was. (A steamship might have been better, but Florida was not blessed with great reserves of coal.)
But the devastation he’d seen over the last two days had been terrible — all the more so because it had fallen on those with so little to begin with. The east coast of Florida, which Stamford Raffles had divided into the provinces of Tegesta and Augustinia, was populated only by those who could obtain land nowhere else. Mostly these were Malays, Javanese and Balinese, with some Bengalis, Keralans, a few Cantonese and a smattering of freedmen teaching them all English so they could at least talk to each other.
Now, everything between Singaraja and Belaga[1] was ravaged — huts stove in, knocked down or just gone. They will rebuild, thought MacCarthy. It always looks hopeless, and they always rebuild. Still, it was his policy to give new homesteads and villages an exemption from taxes of three years. After this hurricane, he was going to have to grant this coast an extension. Between the hurricane and the yellow fever, MacCarthy was beginning to understand why the Spanish had done so little with Florida.
Belaga was the last village for a little while, until you got to the freedmen’s villages south of St. Augustine and the Jewish town of Sepharad. MacCarthy had hopes that north of the cape, the damage would be less. But in the meantime… he took the spyglass from Will Davidson and aimed it at the cape.
MacCarthy gave the orders to halt the ship and ready the boats. There was a shipwreck, farther inland than he’d ever seen one — at least half a mile from the shoreline. It seemed impossible that there would be survivors, but if there were, they’d need help.
He hadn’t even landed when he realized the situation was worse than he’d thought. The beach was littered with the detritus of the sea. The wind (such as it was) was from the west, more or less in the direction of the wreck. There was an eye-watering stench in the air of dead fish, rotting corpses… and something worse than either of these things.
“Follow me,” MacCarthy said to Will. That stench could only have come from one source. As he approached, the cries of seagulls and the buzzing of flies grew louder.
It took them little time to reach the wreck. The ship was on its starboard side atop a sand dune, its hull partly stove in where it lay. Dead men lay strewn about, beginning to bloat, attended by gulls and half-shrouded by a black mist of flies.
MacCarthy didn’t need to see the bits of chain lying about, or the insufferably pious name Paixão de Cristo on the bow, to know what kind of ship this was. The smell gave it away. It was the smell of human shit and piss, mixed with vomit, sweat, sickness, fear, misery and death, all washed down into the bilge to ferment into something unspeakable over those long voyages in the tropical heat. Nothing else this side of Hell stank like a slave ship.
Shooing away the gulls and flies (and thanking God he’d had nothing to eat today besides a little ship’s biscuit) MacCarthy saw the wounds on the corpses, mainly on their heads and chests. These were no random injuries — they were blows, struck with deadly intent. In places, there were brown stains on the sand. And, though their corpses were beginning to blacken, all of the dead on the beach were white men — all but one, a Negro with an indigo tattoo on his forehead that marked him as a free sailor.[2] There were only eight of them — not the normal crew complement of a slaver.
MacCarthy summoned a half dozen more armed men from the Ocean Guard — though he despised slavery as much as any man alive, if the escapees were still about they might not see him as a friend at first glance. Then he and his party followed the footprints north by northwest along the beach.
They came to a sort of crude graveyard in the sand, nineteen shallow graves marked by bits of driftwood set erect. Not far away were gnawed fruit pits[3], and the remains of fish that had already been stripped to the bone. From there, the footprints turned west, toward the Mosquito Lagoon.
A Portuguee slaver, en route to Cuba. The storm drove them north and west, farther than they meant to go. Finally it dashed them against these shores. In the violence of the impact, someone’s chains were broken, or else unmoored from the hull where it caved. He found some tool and freed the others.
Then the fight began. The sailors were better armed, but outnumbered. Out on the deck, they had lost many of their own to the storm, and the exhausted survivors were hardly in better shape to fight than the poor cramped souls in the hold. They killed many… but they died to a man.
The escapees left the fallen slavers for the delectation of the seabirds, but buried their own dead as best they could, well away from the stinking wreck. Then, having no dry tinder nor any means of lighting a fire, they assuaged their hunger with wild fruit and raw fish washed ashore by the storm. With nothing else for them here, they made their way inland to see what they could find.
There was no slavery in British Florida. Once on its soil, a man was free by law. But the load of carrion lying at his feet had mostly been citizens of Portugal, a British ally for centuries, and they had been killed on that same soil. This was going to be… a mess.
[1] Miami and Palm Bay, Florida
[2] Although the Kru (Crou is the more common spelling ITTL) were famously resistant to enslavement themselves, many of them were unfortunately willing to work on slave ships.
[3] Probably saw palmetto berry, cocoplum and seagrape.
