Lempriere's Dictionary (2 page)

A day, bright and chill as this one, the century newly struck, an air of promise and the ships, four of them, bobbing slowly at anchor, masts swaying with the river while behind them, on the packed quay, the crier ascends the platform, draws out his parchment and, shouting over the din of the crowd, begins to read,

“CHARTER GRANTED BY QUEEN ELIZABETH TO THE EAST-INDIA COMPANY, Dated the twentieth Day of
April
, in the forty-second Year of Her Reign, Anno
Domini
, 1600. ELIZABETH, by the Grace of God, Queen of
England, France
and
Ireland
, Defender of the Faith,
&c
. To all our Officers, Ministers and Subjects, and to all other people, as well within this our realm of
England
as elsewhere, under our Obedience and Jurisdiction, or otherwise unto whom these our Letters Patents shall be seen, shewed or read, Greeting.”

To you too, thought the figure on the jetty, welcome.
Finis exordium invocat
.

The crowds shout louder, drowning him out. He continues inaudibly
from the platform, waving his arms. No-one watches. All eyes are on the ships, the
Hector
and the
Ascension
, the
Susan
and the
Dragon
, yard arm and yard arm, decked with pennants, sides rising steep out of the water. Newly caulked, waist and wales encrusted with gingerbread, the closest onlookers can smell Stockholm tar and beneath it the vinegar used to scrub the decks. Below those decks, the stench of the ballast still mingles with both. The hard work has already been done. Sailors scamper up and down the ratlines for show and the junior officers preen. Good order prevails. The crowd has been here an hour and grown no quieter but their enthusiasm is more perfunctory now. They are waiting for a signal to prompt their wildest cheering and from the poop deck of the
Dragon
, Captain James Lancaster is almost ready to send it.

He leans over the side of the ship to direct the tying on of the row-boats’ hawsers to the bowsprit of his own vessel and shouts encouragement to the men who strain like galley slaves at the oars. Gradually, so slowly, the prow begins to turn. Captain Lancaster raises his arm and shouts to the men on the aft winch. He feels a slight tremor through the ship as the current catches it. He drops his arm, the men haul the anchor and the crowd erupts. The voyage has begun. The
Hector
, then the other two follow as the
Dragon
moves its slow bulk into midstream. The wind catches their sails, but it is the tide that moves them as the ships gather momentum. The sailors wave stiffly. From the shore, they already look like marionettes, tiny figures as the show moves further down the river. The crowds around the docks and the surrounding wharves wave back. Their shouts reach thinly across the intervening water. The sailors can barely hear them now, barely see them as they begin to undrape the bunting festooned about the wales, the ships emerging from the gaudy decoration, vessels of hard oak headed out in line for the East.

Along the riverbank, the curious have already begun to drift away. A vague disappointment that the spectacle is at an end works its way through the crowd, dividing it into twos and threes, little clumps which move awkwardly through each other as they disperse. The riverside wharves begin to clear, revealing those with reason enough to stay until the ships disappear around the river’s bend. A little way down the quay, the aldermen congratulate themselves on the smoothness of it all. Invited dignitaries criticise them in an undertone. The investors look tense. Was it madness? The risk of it all, will it pay? True venturers, they tell each other not to worry as their money floats down the river. And a close-knit knot of men there, eight or nine of them, set off a little, out of earshot. The orator is audible again as the crowd’s din becomes a buzz, a hum, a thousand private conversations.

“… that they and every of them, from henceforth be, and shall be one Body Corporate and Politick, in Deed and in Name, by the Name of The
Governor and Company of Merchaunts of London, Trading into the East Indies
, really and fully, for us, our Heirs and Successors, we do order, make, ordain, constitute, establish and declare, by these presents, and that by the same name of
Honourable Governor and Company of Merchaunts of London, Trading into the East Indies
, they shall have succession, and that they and their successors be and shall be, at all Times hereafter, Persons able and capable in Law, and a Body Corporate and Politick, and capable in Law to have, purchase, receive, possess, enjoy and retain, Lands, Rents, Priviledges, Liberties, Jurisdictions, Franchises and Hereditaments of whatsoever Kind, Nature and Quality so ever, they be to them and their Successors.”

The nine men seem to pay close attention, looking away from each other, heads tilted to catch the words, an act. They do not care what he says. They have reached their decision and the purpose of their long journey from Rochelle is clearer to them. They too have thought of risk. They have counted the hazards of the journey that has just begun. The events that have led them to consider a venture on these hateful shores are unclear even to them but, despite the show of calm as they stand in silence together, the fact of their being so distant from home bespeaks the depth of their need, their restraint and their patience. For they will not invest in this voyage. They have counted the risks and now they count upon them. They will wait for the voyage to founder, for the ships to meet their fate. They will wait for the investors’ nerve to break and the Company to fail. They have their own idea as to what the scene they have witnessed might eventually mean.

Their hopes of failure sail on, the four of them, drawn by the tide past Gravesend, by the wind a little closer to the east and its dream of riches. They move downriver to the estuary, thence to an anchorage off the Downs to take on victuals. The barter goods are already stowed. They set sail again and news of them grows scarce. Tiny segments of their long journey drift back in the few ships that pass them on the open seas, from traders who have passed through the ports in which these ships berth. Stories that might tell of them, strange incidents without context or meaning which, as days turn to weeks, are seized upon as proof of their continued existence, if only that. The master gunner of the
Ascension
died after falling from the main yard and a shoal of flying fish swam by. A French vessel brought back his belongings. They had witnessed his burial at sea. And the two that resulted from it, for the firing of the ordnance had
been careless. A stray shot had killed the Captain and the boatswain’s mate.

News turned to anecdotes, anecdotes to rumour, to flotsam carried on the sea-surface, altered and washed up in the port of London where the investors combed the wharves for whatever they might find until they were forced to admit that the gleaned scraps told them nothing. Thereafter, they contented themselves in discussion and plotting the desired course on maps. Their carefully drawn lines soon reached the area where the coasts became speculation and their apprehension grew.

They need not have fretted, thought the distant figure on the jetty. Almost two centuries later, he had read Lancaster’s log and observed in its terse catalogue of incidents and bearings a continuing acknowledgement of his fleet’s endeavour. Lancaster himself had emerged as a man built upon an inflexible determination to carry the voyage and all else before him or perish in the attempt. As the ships sailed on, the task entrusted to him became all his being and he saw each day’s progress as an additional, strengthening fibre in the fabric of himself.

The fleet had sailed south, reaching the Canaries on the seventh of May and the Tropic five days after that. Scurvy held off till August, then claimed a round hundred. They doubled the Cape on the first of November. A storm saw them through the Christmas of 1600, taking two anchors with it. They weathered that and those that followed, but the shoals of Adu almost claimed them. Hedged about by rocks with barely four fathoms, the pinnace was sent out to find a channel; found one, praise God. May came with fair winds and a sighting of Nicobar. June gave them Dachen and Dachen would give them their first boatload of pepper.

As the fleet sailed into the mouth of the Malacca Straits on the evening of the last day of June, the mariners saw the light of a hundred fires ranged along the coast. They burned all night and on the morrow Captain Lancaster took the row-boat ashore. The king of Dachen welcomed Lancaster and his men with fresh fruit and mutton roasted over charcoal. Lancaster gave the king a silver tray and showed him his letters of patent. The king sent his greetings to her Majesty in return and gave Lancaster an elephant. The Dutch were a surly lot, thought the king, and haggled well. He would do business with the Englanders. In August, Lancaster discovered the root of their fulsome welcome. It lay in Bantam, only a few days’ sail through the Malacca Straits. The king of Bantam had pepper to sell too; at a third of the price. An adjustment was proposed in Dachen and a new price negotiated. The English were as surly as the Dutch, concluded the king, and he resolved that henceforth the traders would be denied the hospitality of his table. The elephant was returned.

The four ships sailed between Dachen and Bantam, bartering for
pepper, buying when they had no choice. The sailors liked the easy days’ sailing between anchorages while the merchants complained of delays, lading pepper into the holds and counting, always counting. The Dutch, when encountered at all, seemed almost to encourage them in their dealings. Their complaisance aroused Lancaster’s suspicion but he could discover no deeper purpose behind it in the weeks that followed; besides, trade was good. The summer and winter passed this way. A trading post was set up on Bantam and in the following February, with the holds full to bursting, Captain James Lancaster decided that time had arrived to begin the long journey home. On the twentieth day of August 1602, the four ships raised their anchors, fired off their ordnance and set sail for England.

In London, the investors had relapsed into helpless calm. They had not given up hope, and they had not given up waiting. But their expectancy had turned in on itself when it could no longer be contented with news. Now it was only the elapse of time. Although they met frequently enough, they no longer spoke of the four ships. They had heard nothing for two years. Their encounters were tense, hearty affairs, each singly aware of what now seemed their joint failure. Their thirst for adventure had diminished considerably and it appeared that nothing might revive it.

Their pessimism was to prove ill-founded however, for two oceans away, the roof of the world was lifting over the Indies. As the pressure dropped it drew in the winds and sent them gusting across the Indian Ocean where Captain Lancaster recognised them for what they were and hoisted all the canvas he had. The monsoon would carry them home.

First word of the fleet’s return arrived in unspectacular fashion by way of a French merchant who arrived in London to buy tallow. Tallow was not Julien Beaudeguerre’s usual line and England was not his usual market. Ordinarily, he bought carpets from the Moriscos, selling them to the wealthier burghers of Provence. Tallow was his cousin’s business, but he had fallen ill a week after landing the contract for a lodge north of Arles. A misfortune for everyone, but in particular for Julien. He had been prevailed upon. He had succumbed. He was here. Tallow was tedious stuff and his Morisco friends had not been pleased. They had proposed sending their rugs and carpets by ship to be collected by him in London. They had heard that a small fleet was making its way up the coast from their trading partners in Africa. Julien should seek news of them in London on the off-chance that this unlikely plan might work. Three days after his arrival, Julien duly began repeating what his Moorish friends had told him and he bent the ear of every mariner, water-man and wharf rat he could find. No-one could confirm or deny the five words that he laboriously spread about the port but when his phrase reached the ears of Philpot, De Vere and the
other investors it lit their resigned acceptance of loss with a faint glimmer of hope. ‘An ‘
Ector
and tre others’ was Julien’s only English.

The process by which the fleet had faded from sight to rumour and thence to nothing had begun to reverse itself along with the Trades that were bringing them home. Beaudeguerre’s scrap was followed by others. All four were safe, said one report. All three, said another. Their holds were full and their holds were empty. Their crews were dead men kept alive by a strange light on the mast-head and they were pulled through the sea by mermaids. Word went around that a Frenchman had got ten guineas from Philpot and De Vere for his news and a flourishing trade sprang up in Shadwell where plausible stories were concocted to be sold to the waiting investors. The investors saw through these fabrications but paid anyway. They mentioned them casually to each other, laughing at the more fanciful. A report that the
Saint Anthony
had been captured and a cargo of silver taken proved popular enough to be sold twice. News grew more frequent in the weeks that followed Beaudeguerre’s arrival and the more blatant contradictions and wilder flights of fancy diminished. There were indeed four ships. And their holds were full to bursting. On the twenty-first day of September 1602 they were sighted off the Downs. The investors no longer tried to contain their delight. Surely, their boldness had paid off. Two days later, they learned for the first time that the cargo was pepper and knew then that their original daring, the assiduous maintenance of their hope and new expectation of its fulfilment were as nothing, not even dust, to the devious reversals of fate.

The four ships sailed up the Thames on the morning tide like women of strong virtue. A thousand seducers had courted them with destruction and they bore the scars of rebuffal proudly to prove it. Their masts were split, their sails patched and their sides a motley of leaking and replaced planks. The sea was an insistent lover. Aboard the
Dragon
, Captain Lancaster led his four vessels to where the pilot met them and picked a course through the shoals and sandbanks of the Thames. They moved slowly upstream towards Blackwall, whence they had set out almost three years before. He thought of the pepper which filled the holds, one million pounds of it, and the price it would bring. Eight shillings for every one of those pounds. The men had almost mutinied during the return and the ship had almost fallen apart, but they had returned intact and his heart was full of England. The crowds that had sent them off in such magnificence were no longer there, but London looked much as it ever had. As did his sponsors, the investors, whom he could see on the quayside as he approached the dock.