The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (238 page)

LATE
1700
AND EARLY 1701

M
INERVA
DROPPED ANCHOR
below the burning mountain of Griga in the Marian Islands on the fifth of September. The next day the Shaftoe boys and a squad of Filipino sailors went ashore and ascended to the rim of a secondary cinder-cone on the western slope of the mountain proper. They established a watch-post there, within sight of
Minerva
. For two days they flew a single flag, which meant
We are here, and still alive.
The next day it was two flags, which meant
We have seen sails coming out of the west,
and the day after that it was three, meaning
It is the Manila Galleon.

Van Hoek had the crew make preparations for departure. The next morning the Shaftoe boys struck their camp and came down, still coughing and rubbing their eyes from the fumes that hissed out of that cinder-cone day and night, and after splashing around gleefully in the cove for a few minutes, washing off dust and sweat, they came out to
Minerva
in the longboat and announced that the Galleon had commenced her long northward run at dawn.

For two days they wove a course among the Marian Islands—a chain that ran from about thirteen degrees at its southern end, to
about twenty degrees at the north. Some of the islands were steep-sided volcanoes with deep water all around, but most were so flat that they did not rise more than a yard or two above the level of the ocean, be they never so large. These were belted all round with dangerous shallows, and yet they were easy to overlook in darkness or weather. So for a few days their energies were devoted to simply not disembowelling themselves on coral-reefs, and they did not see the Manila Galleon at all.

Some of the islands were populated by stocky natives who came and went in outrigger canoes, and one or two even had Jesuit missions on them, built of mud, like wasps’ nests. The sheer desolation of the place explained why they’d chosen it as a rendezvous point. If
Minerva
had set out from Cavite on the same tide as the Galleon, it would have been obvious to everyone in the Philippines that some conspiracy had been forged. Almost as bad, it would have added several weeks to the length of
Minerva
’s voyage. The Manila Galleon was such a wallowing pig of a ship, and had been so gravely overloaded by Manila’s officialdom, that only a storm could move it. The exit from Manila Bay, which took most ships but a single day, had taken the Manila Galleon a week. Then, rather than taking to the open sea, she had turned south and then east, and picked her way down the tortuous passages between Luzon and the islands to the south, anchoring frequently, and occasionally pausing to say a mass over the wrack of some predecessor; for the passage was marked out, not with buoys, but with the remains of Manila Galleons from one, ten, fifty, or a hundred years past. Finally the Galleon had reached a sheltered anchorage off a small island called Ticao. She had dropped anchor there and spent three weeks gazing out over twenty miles of water at the gap between the southern extremity of Luzon, and the northern cape of Samar, which was called the San Bernardino Strait. Beyond it the Pacific stretched all the way to Acapulco. Yet Luzon might as well have been Scylla and Samar Charybdis, because (as the Spaniards had learnt the hard way) any ship that tried to sally through that gap when the tides and the winds were not just so would be cast away. Twice she had raised anchor and set sail for the Strait only to turn back when the wind shifted slightly.

Boats had come out to the Galleon at all hours to replenish her stocks of drinking water, fruit, bread, and livestock, which were being drawn down at an appalling rate by the merchants and men of the cloth who were packed into her cabins. Indeed this had been the whole point of taking the route through the San Bernardino Strait, for by going that way they had been able to get two hundred and fifty miles closer to the Marianas without passing out of sight of the Philippines.

When finally she had broken out on the tenth of August—a month and a half after departing Manila—she had done so fully provisioned. Almost as important, the officials, priests, and soldiers who had stood by at the foot of Bulusan Volcano to witness and salute the great ship’s departure had seen her venture forth into the Pacific
alone
.

Minerva
had sailed out of Manila Bay two weeks after the Galleon and had gone for a leisurely cruise round the northern tip of Luzon, then had looped back to the south and taken shelter in Lagonoy Gulf, which emptied into the Pacific some sixty miles to the north of the San Bernardino Strait. There, by trading with natives and making occasional hunting and gathering forays, they had been able to keep their own stocks replenished while they had waited for the Galleon to escape from the Philippine Islands. Padraig Tallow had been among the crowd at the foot of Bulusan watching that event, and he’d thrown his peg-leg over the saddle of a horse and ridden northward until he had come to a high place above the Gulf of Lagonoy whence he could signal
Minerva
by building a smokey fire.
Minerva
had fired the Irishman a twenty-gun salute and hoisted her sails. Padraig Tallow’s doings after that were unknown to them. If he’d stayed in character, he’d have stood where he was until the tip of
Minerva
’s mainmast had sunk below the eastern horizon, weeping and singing incomprehensible chanties. If things had gone according to plan, he’d then ridden his horse through the
bundok,
following the tracks from one steamy mission-town to the next, until he’d reached Manila, and he and Surendranath, and the one son of Queen Kottakkal who’d survived the last years’ voyaging, and several other Malabaris were now making their way down the long coast of Palawan to join Mr. Foot in Queena-Kootah.

For her part
Minerva
had sailed almost due east for fifteen hundred miles to the Marianas, passing the Manila Galleon somewhere along the way.

Now they sailed north out of those islands without ever catching sight of her. This was just as well for all involved in the conspiracy—including all of the Galleon’s officers. The bored Jesuits and soldiers scattered among those islands would see the Galleon, and would see
Minerva,
but would never see them
together
.

Weather made it impossible to observe the sun or look for the Galleon’s sails for two days after they put the Marianas behind them. Then the sun came out, and they traversed the Tropic of Cancer and sighted the Galleon’s topsails, far to the east, at almost the same moment. It was the fifteenth of September. Even before the
northernmost of the burning islands of the Marianas had sunk below the southern horizon, they had gone off soundings, which meant that their sounding-lead, even when it was fully paid out, dangled miles above the floor of an ocean whose depth was literally unfathomable. After several days had gone by without sighting land they had brought
Minerva
’s anchors up on deck and stowed them deep in the hold.

They traversed the thirtieth parallel, which meant that they had reached the latitude of southern Japan. Still they continued north. They could not keep the Galleon in sight all the time, of course. But it was not necessary to follow in her wake. They had only two requirements. One was to discover the magic latitude, known only to the Spanish, that would take them safely to California. The other was to arrive in Acapulco at about the same time as the Galleon, so that certain officers aboard that ship could smooth the way for them. With her narrow hull
Minerva
could not carry as many provisions as the Galleon, but she could sail faster, and so the general plan was to speed across the Pacific and then tarry off California for a few weeks, surviving on the fresh water and game of that country, while keeping a lookout for the Galleon.

But they could not bolt east until they were sure of the right latitude, and so every day they posted lookouts at the top of
Minerva
’s foremast and had them scan the horizon for the sails of the Manila Galleon. Having sighted her, they would plot a converging course, and creep closer until they could see how her sails had been trimmed. The winds almost always came from the southeastern quarter of the compass rose, and every time they caught sight of the Galleon she seemed to be going free, which was a way of saying that the wind was coming in from behind her and from one side—in this case, the starboard. In other words the Galleon’s captain was still bending all his efforts to gain latitude, and seemed not to know or care that he had five thousand miles to cover eastwards; or that every degree he went north was a degree he’d later have to go south (Manila and Acapulco lying at nearly the same latitude).

They spent a few days becalmed at thirty-two degrees, then advanced due north to thirty-six degrees, then encountered weather. At the beginning this came out of the east, which made van Hoek extremely nervous that they would be cast away on the shores of Japan (they were at the latitude of Edo, which Gabriel Goto had claimed was the largest city in the world, and so it wasn’t as if the wreck of their ship would go unnoticed). But then the wind shifted around to the northwest and they were forced to put up a storm-sail and scud before it. The weather was not nearly as threatening as the
waves, which were mountainous.

It happened sometimes that when a wind shifted violently, or a ship was miserably handled, or both, the wind would blow in over the head and strike a ship’s sails directly in the face, plastering the canvas back over the rigging, and frequently slamming crew-members off of their perches. The ship would be flung into disarray. She’d go dead in the water, making her rudder quite useless, and would drift and spin like a stunned fish until she was brought in hand again. This was called being taken a-back, and it could happen to persons as well as ships. Jack had never seen van Hoek taken aback until the Dutchman emerged from belowdecks at one point to see one of those waves rolling toward them. Its crest of foam alone was large enough to swallow
Minerva
.

The only way to survive seas like these was to manage rudder and a few scraps of canvas in such a way that the waves never struck the ship broadside. That was the only thing the men on
Minerva
thought about for the next forty-eight hours. Sometimes they stood poised on watery mountain-tops and enjoyed the view; seconds later they’d be in a trough with seemingly vertical walls of water blocking their vision fore and aft.

After Jack had been awake for some thirty consecutive hours, he began to see things that weren’t there. For the most part this was preferable to seeing the things that
were
. But strangely enough—with so many natural dangers all around—the one fear that obsessed him was that they would collide with the Manila Galleon. Early in the storm he had seen a great wave coming in the corner of his eye, and phant’sied somehow that it was the Galleon riding a storm-crest; the dark bulk of the wave he took to be her hull of Philippine mahogany, the foamy crest he imagined was her sails. Of course in such a storm she wouldn’t have canvas up at all, but in this momentary dream she was a ghost-ship, already dead, and riding the storm with every inch of canvas stretched out before the wind. Of course it was really nothing more than just another damned great wave and so he forgot this apparition in the next instant.

Every wave that came their way was a fresh challenge to their existence, as formidable as anything the Duc d’Arcachon or Queen Kottakkal had flung at them, and had to be met and survived with fresh energy and ingenuity. But they kept coming. And late in the storm, when Jack and everyone else on the ship had entirely lost their minds, and were surviving only because they were in the habit of surviving, the phant’sy of the ghost-Galleon came back and haunted him for long hours. Every wave that came towards them he saw as the underside of the Galleon’s hull, the barnacled keel coming down on
them like the blade of an axe.

He woke up lying on the deck, in the same position where he had collapsed hours before, at the end of the storm. Bright light was in his eyes but he was shivering, because it was damnably cold.

“Thirty-seven degrees…twelve minutes,” croaked van Hoek, working nearby with a back-staff, “assuming…that I have the day right.” He paused frequently to heave great laboring sighs, as if the effort of forcing words out was almost too much for him.

Jack—who’d been lying on his stomach—rolled onto his back. His arms had been pressed underneath him the whole time he’d been asleep, and were completely numb and dead now, like sopping rags a-dangle from his shoulders. “And what d’you suppose the day is?”

“If that storm lasted a mere two days, I am ashamed at selling myself so cheaply. For a two-day storm should not leave a sea-captain half dead.”

“You are half dead? I am at least three-quarters dead.”

“Further evidence that it was more than two days. On the other hand, we could not have survived four days of that.”

“I am not some Jesuit, bent on arguing. If you call it three days, I will agree.”

“Then we agree that this is October the first.”

“Any sign of the Galleon?”

Van Hoek squinted up. “No one has the strength to go above and look. I doubt she survived. So big, and so overloaded…now I understand why they build a new one every year. Even if she survived, she’d be worn out.”

“What do we do in that case?”

“North,” said van Hoek. “They say that if we turn east too soon, we will make it most of the way across the Pacific, only to be becalmed, almost within sight of America, where we’ll starve to death.”

This conversation happened at dawn. It was midday before
Minerva
’s topmasts could be raised again, and midafternoon before she was under way, sailing north by northeast. Every man was busy repairing the ship, and those who had no skills at carpentry or rope-work were sent down to the bilge to collect quicksilver that had trickled down there from broken flasks.

Two days later they grazed the fortieth parallel, which put them at the same latitude as the northern extremes of Japan. Van Hoek finally consented to sail towards America. His intention was to hew closely to forty degrees, which (according to a bit of lore he had pried out of a drunken Spanish sea-captain in Manila) would lead eventually to Cape Mendocino. But this went the way of all intentions
a day later when he discovered that some combination of winds, currents, and wandering compass-needle had driven them down almost to thirty nine degrees. He laughed at this, and that evening when they gathered in the dining cabin to saw at planks of dried beef and flick maggots out of their beans, he explained why: “Legend would have it that the Spaniards have found out some secret way across the Pacific Ocean. It is a good legend because it prevents Dutchmen, Englishmen, and other prudent Protestants from attempting the voyage. But now I know the truth, which is that they
wander
across, driven north and south willy-nilly, placing their lives and estates in the hands of innumerable saints. So let us drink to any saints who may be listening!”