Lempriere's Dictionary (13 page)

The currents met in confusion about the dead water marking the mouth of the estuary. The waves threw up brief, white crests and on the choppy
surface a gull bobbed uneasily. Its wings grabbed the air in exploratory fashion, hauling itself into flight as the tide began to heave the thoughtless currents into its channel and the sea’s agitation ceded to a deep, purposeful swell. The waters stirred vaguely at first, then, catching the insistent tug, united in a determined flow towards the city.

On the half-defined horizon, just visible in the winter light, a royal-sail signalled the approach of a ship under full sail before the light wind, cutting through the water in an effort to catch the tide. The gallants, then mainsails appeared as she entered the estuary and the currents began to draw her into the mouth of the river. Tamasa, dark river, Tamesis. The Thames.

Twelve-hundred tons unladen, her maiden voyage. Aboard, the lascars worked quickly to slacken sail as the flow of water began to draw her on. She progressed, the Indiaman
Nottingham
, late of China and the cape of Comorin. The caulkers, carpenters and joiners of Thomas Brown’s yard had done their work well, she looked untouched by the voyage, tackle mostly stowed and ports sealed. Pride of the East Indian fleet, the
Nottingham
sat low and profitable in the water which carried her inland. Her timbers were sound, had weathered well, the futtock hoops still tight, pumps barely used. With little tumblehome, the
Nottingham’s
topsides grew sheer out of the water. She wore her size grandly as she progressed in mute pomp up the Thames.

It was partly masked by the larger ship, partly it seemed to merge with the undistinguished grey of the sea. Even lightly laden the vessel wallowed in the swell. Half the tonnage at most, it steered a guileful course along the wake of the
Nottingham
, a spent prodigal trailing the acknowledged heir. Aboard, there were no lascars, but the weather-tanned faces of the crew might have been taken for them. They worked hard and in ill-humour at the demands of the antiquated rigging. The shiny ropes afforded little purchase, sliding quickly through blocks worn thin with use. Straining timbers creaked and this, along with the slapping of the water on its hull, was the only sound to be heard on board for the men worked in silence. The two ships continued on.

Captain Pannell of the
Nottingham
was already looking forward to a brag in the Jerusalem. He assembled his crew on deck to deliver the customary homily. Tars and lascars listened respectfully, the former accepting it for what it was, part of the homecoming ritual. The lascars, whose command of the language of lanyards and hawsers, fore topsails and mizen moon-rakers might have put the Clerk of Cordage to shame, listened without comprehension as veiled allusions to the Pox and reminders of the pickpockets’ cunning drifted aimlessly down from the quarter-deck. Only one of their number had the least idea of the point of the speech, but for him it was superfluous in any case. Nazim-ud-Dowlah kept his thoughts to
himself and attended to Captain Pannell’s words passive as the rest. The lascars shivered in the raw breeze which cut across the deck. As the great ship moved serenely through the water and the banks of the river on either side grew in definition, trees and fields became visible from the deck. Soon, the first few houses could be seen. At Gravesend a long-boat met the
Nottingham
, ferrying the pilot who would guide her draught the last stage of the voyage through the channels of the Thames to Deptford. And down the conduit Lud’s Town now sent other tokens of its welcome, ruined spars, offal, rags. An occasional turd bobbed malodorously like a miniature monastic tonsure.

Even in November the river-stench was strong; Pannell breathed it in appreciatively, thought of typhus. As they approached Deptford the fields on either side began to be punctuated by houses and hovels, people waving. Nazim noticed how welcoming they looked. The pilot favoured the left bank now. At times they were only fifty feet from the shore. Men and women could be made out quite plainly. An argument was being conducted on the left hand bank. Bierce, James, discharged of Rowlandson’s Glass-house that morning, sought entrance to his own front door without success. His wife leaned from an upstairs window to hurl abuse and his possessions down upon the hapless miscreant below. Earthenware, clothes, pans, the usual rained down. Some missiles overshot their mark and landed in the river. Amongst these a pamphlet, cheaply bound, signed only “Asiaticus”, its pages fluttered before plummeting into the swell which upheld its claim to float only for a moment. The leaves breast-stroked downwards, the ink dissolving in part and contributing in small measure to the surrounding murk of the waters. The river grew populous. Bloated bodies, dogs and cats, a pig, mingled with small islands of foaming scum, nameless things without shape or colour, only their reek identified them to the crew. The city sent its virulence as emissary, Cloacina his gracious consort.

The
Nottingham
and its shadow moved out to mid-stream now. The pacquets, pleasure-boats, and ketches which crowded the upper reaches of the river acknowledged the draught of the great Indiaman and cleared the deepest channel. As the
Nottingham
neared the Upper Wet Docks the watermen working out of George Stairs checked their wherries, paddling slowly against the current. Their passengers balanced the spectacle against their impatience. Pannell thought of his lading, fifty tons from a cargo over fifteen hundreds, pounds per pound, ratios of weight to volume, and his ship moved on. The turn was made and the
Nottingham
eased through the narrow entrance-channel of the dock, the water seeming to rise, volume displaced equal to the weight or the mass, somesuch. Balance the boat against the ocean, the ocean rises by fractions of fractions. How many
ships equal an inch? The whole fleet of ninety or more, aggregate of eighty-seven thousands of tons, not enough. The fleet manned and laden, the same ships, aggregate of… he calculated … perhaps one hundred and eighty thousands, still not enough.

‘Hove to!’

The mooring lines were thrown and the ship made fast. The long voyage was at an end.

Stevedores ran in a gang along the dockside. They, their fathers and grandfathers had seen a thousand such ships. Their ancestors would have unloaded the first of the line that stretched back through the centuries to the
Susan
, the
Hector
and the
Ascension
. Men hardened by labour, agents of Copia, millet, rye and wheat. Amalthaea’s horn, fruits and raisins, flowers and pearls. Silver and gold. All the goods and spices of the fabled East had passed through their hands. Portingales, English and Hollanders had opened the routes, right enough. But it was here, down in the stink of the hold, that stevedores grasped the real weight of the venturers’ tales: ratios of mass to value, pounds per cubic foot, the specific dimensions of the horn of plenty. They barked their shins on the crates, cracked their heads on the beams. They cursed. The oil-lamps swung and cast strange shadows. The gang worked hard, each man anticipating the movements of his workmates. From above, it looked as though all their labours were directed at the square of light through which, at the last, the final crate would be passed. Yet they worked away from it. The layered goods were their strata and each group mined its seam. Had they been asked what they sought as they worked deeper into the ship, not one could have replied. Yet about their work was an unfulfilled expectation that had nothing to do with the long hours or the short pay. Crates began to pile up on deck as the men sweated below. They worked in parts of the ship that its commanders would never see, but the cargo was their business. Time and time over the stevedores had stripped the vessel bare and found nothing. No ship had a secret, they had proved it a hundred times.

But still, in the temper of their work, as they uncovered what had been laid down months before and hauled it to the surface, there remained something of a search. As if they were peeling away those months, working back through the years, the decades. The centuries even. The eyes of the pullers and pushers, the lifters and luggers maintained a focus, always behind the next case. What more lay back there? And how much below? They of all people knew that brute weight was all the story, and still they sought the tale, the old line that there had ever been more than profit in it. A romance of other and distant places, when the first adventurers were scraping the gilt from the treasure chest, this is what drives them deeper into the hold. Deeper and further back, through the cases
crammed with dark tea to spices by way of Ormus, Babylon and Tra-pizond. Yielding Caffa and the Euxine, Cabo Correntes, Soffala and Mosambique, whence north to Querinba, Mombasa, Melinde, east to Musaladay, Asaday, the whole of Madagascar and then the jewel, Goa, omphalos of the Portingale trade. And from them gold, ivory, negroes, tobacco, the first trickle becoming a flood, the Red Sea covered in sail-cloth as the markets of Aden, Arabia, Egypt and Palestine opened their doors to the pallid interlopers with their bleeding gums from across the seas. Men bearing gifts of calico and beads. Ships and their sailors bearing charters and letters of marque. On they went to Comoro, Mohilla and Mauritius, deeper and further to the Maldives and Malmallas, Ceylon rich in cinnamon, Nicobar, Sumatra and Java, the Moluccas, further to the Banda islands and beyond them to Japan and China for sugar, green ginger, pearls, alum and amber, radix, musk and raw silk, enough to set a sail over the Indies and steer them back to clamorous England. For milady wants new perfumes and John Company’s always been a ladies’ man: civet, ambergreise, sandal-wood and myrrh she shall have. For her fair neck, diamonds, rubies, pearls and spinells, bracelets of amethyst and emerald, rings of all these, jasper and lapis lazuli. Her cook wants pepper. And nutmegs, cloves and ginger. And cinnamon and powder-candy…. And the country is in want of gold, silver, copper and tin. And tea, saltpetre and silk. And indigo to dye it with. John Company’s an obliging fellow. Persia, China, the Carnatic, none hold fears for him. The voyage out, the voyage back. A commander could retire on the proceeds of five.

Three more for Pannell, who watched as the first of the dunnage, bamboo and raffia, was lifted from the hold. Blacked and lacquered it would fetch eighty guineas at sale or he’d be damned. Seventy Indiamen in the year, averaging eight hundreds of tons, cargoes averaging, what, nine hundreds, totalling three and sixty thousands of tons. Fifteen hundred of them mine, he thought, as the stevedores manhandled the tea-chests from the hold. The Company’s, he corrected himself. The cases went on and on, they would be unlading the rest of the week. By which time the
Albion
will have arrived, and after her the
Belvedere
, the
Princess Charlotte, Earl Howe
and
Sulivan
and eighty-six others. Each disgorging its cargo to the quays, the warehouses and markets of the city.

Out, over the river, Wren’s cathedral resembled a great galleon about which the churches formed a squadron of frigates jostling at anchor. Pannell looked away, but the work of unlading continued without him. Case after case was wrestled from the
Nottingham’s
hold to the shore.

Nazim left the ship with the others; home for the last nine months, he did not give it a backward glance. His attention was fixed upon the nondescript vessel which had trailed them to port. It moved slowly up the
river, piloted by its captain, towards Rotherhithe. Nazim watched until it rounded a bend in the river to be lost from his sight. It continued on, wallowing upstream towards its berth where it docked without incident and lay at anchor, creaking, taking on water. No stevedores rushed to greet it, only a grizzled and crippled old sea-farer cast more than a glance as he hauled himself slowly along the quay. And a face appeared briefly at the attic window of Captain Guardian’s house further up. The ship’s crew shuffled belowdecks, heads down, hands jammed in pockets. Their vessel rocked gently with the Thames-tide, its return long overdue, long beyond the faith or patience of any who might be expected to await it, tap, tap, tap against the wharf, a drab tattoo for the homecoming of the
Vendragon
.

A matter of a few miles down the river, Nazim reflected on the long route he had travelled to find this ship. Chance had brought it alongside the
Nottingham
a day’s sail from the estuary. There had been no formal contact, no exchange of pleasantries between the captains. That had surprised Pannell, but it had not surprised Nazim. He had felt a keen disappointment as the
Vendragon
sailed up the Thames and out of his view. It hardly mattered, he told himself, for now he knew its destination. And its purpose. He had been saved the trouble of searching for it. The task before him was huge enough without that. Nine men, nine faceless men. One name.

His companions were beckoning him over, eager to leave for the barracks. He had gained their trust on the voyage and with it, he hoped, their help. It might yet come to that. Their guileless faces looked out to the city with its fine buildings of brick and stone. The river rolled by, stinking.