The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (239 page)

Thus they wandered for most of October. It turned out that the storm had done irreparable injury to the foremast, rendering it more trouble than it was worth, and so they lost a knot or two. Sometimes the wind would grow frigid and bear down out of the north, pushing them toward the latitude of thirty-five degrees, which was the lowest that van Hoek would tolerate. Then they would have to work painstakingly into the wind. The cold spray blew into the faces of the Filipino and Malay sailors like chips of flint. Van Hoek’s insistence on remaining far to the north led them to grumble. Jack did not think they were going to mutiny, but he could easily imagine circumstances in which they
would
. The difference in climate between thirty-five and forty degrees was considerable, and winter was making no secret of its intentions.

They had no idea where they were. Indeed, the very notion of being somewhere lost its hold on their minds after they had gone for a month without seeing any land; if some Fellow of the Royal Society had been a-board with a newfangled instrument for measuring longitude, the figures would have meant nothing to them. Van Hoek made estimates based on their speed, and at one point announced that they had probably crossed over the meridian dividing the East from the West Hemisphere. But under close interrogation from Moseh, he admitted that it might have happened last week or that it might happen a week in the future.

Jack saw no difference between East water and West water. They were in a part of the world that, on the Doctor’s maps, either had not appeared at all (it being considered sinful wastefulness to leave such a large expanse of fine vellum blank) or else had been covered up by some vast Barock cartouche with words printed on it in five-hundred-mile-high letters, surrounded by bare-breasted mermaids blasting away on conch-shells.
Minerva
had crawled underneath the legends, compass-roses, analemmas, and cartouches that were superimposed
on all the world’s maps and globes, and vanished from all charts, ceased to exist. Jack had a phant’sy of some young Princess in a drawing-room staring at a map, and seeing a bit of movement under the eastern edge of some bit of engraver’s
trompe l’oeil,
a scrap of faux-weather-beaten scrollwork where the cartographer had writ his name. She would suppose it to be a wandering silverfish at first—then, peering at it through a magnifying lens, would resolve the outlines of a certain ship filled with mercury…

Anyway, he was not the only man aboard seeing strange visions, for one day early in November, the lookout let out a wail of mingled fear and confusion. It was not a cheering kind of sound, coming from a lookout, and so it got the attention of every man on board.

“He says that there is a ship in the distance—but not a ship of this world,” Dappa said.

“What the hell does that mean?” van Hoek demanded.

“She sails upside-down. She leaps from place to place and her form shifts, as if she were a droplet of quicksilver trapped between sea and sky.”

Jack found this marvelously poetickal, but van Hoek was all ready with a tedious explanation: “Tell him he is only seeing a mirage. It might be another ship that lies over the horizon, or it might be a reflection of our own vessel. But there is probably not another ship within two thousand miles of us, and so it is most likely the latter.”

But every man who was not busy with something else ascended the ratlines and got in position to view this entertainment. Jack got up sooner and higher than most. As a shareholder, he slept in a cabin instead of belowdecks, and as an Englishman he kept his windows open unless there was a positive hurricane blowing, and he had escaped the never-ending round of catarrhs, influenzas, rheumatic malfunctions, and fœbrile disorders that eddied through the crew. At any rate he had more energy and better lungs than they did and so he climbed all the way to the topmast trestletrees: high enough that he could take in
Minerva
’s whole length at a glance. At first the mirage was not visible, but van Hoek said that this was the common way of mirages and to be patient. So while he was being patient in the topmast trestletrees, Jack looked down at the crew, struggling up the ratlines and coughing, spitting, and scratching themselves just like the audience in a theatre, waiting for the show to begin. This was not such a bad similitude either. From the point of view of a drawing-room Princess,
Minerva
had vanished underneath a florid mermaid-cartouche. But from
Minerva
’s point of view, it was the world that had disappeared—somewhat as players do when the story pauses between acts. With their wigs, costumes, swords, and
stage-props they exeunt; nothing happens for a while; the audience shifts, mutters, farts, cracks hazel-nuts, hawks up phlegm; and if it is a better class of theatre, there begins a little play-within-the-play, an
entr’acte
.

“Mira!”
someone shouted, and Jack looked up to see it.

The phantom-ship appeared to be no more than a cannon-shot away from them. At times it appeared quite normal and solid. Then it would split into two symmetrical images, one right-side-up and one upside-down, or it would warp and flit about, like a drop trapped between panes of glass and being moved hither and thither by the pressure of a finger.

But when it was solid and stable for a moment, it was obviously not
Minerva
but some other ship. It had men on it, and they had trimmed her sails to run before the wind, just as
Minerva
was doing. Several of them had climbed into her rigging to gawk and point at something.

“Does she have any cannon run out?” van Hoek inquired.

“It would be a strange part of the world to go a-pirating,” said Dappa.

“Hmph!”

“She is running up a flag,” said Moseh de la Cruz. “She must see us, as we see her!”

Red silk bloomed in the mirage, a sudden billowing of flame. In the middle of it a gold cross and some other heraldic designs. Every man sighed at once.

“It is the Manila Galleon!” Jack announced.

At this news van Hoek finally bestirred himself. He climbed to the maintop and began trying to fix his spyglass on the mirage, which was like trying to spear a flea with a jack-knife. There was a certain amount of cursing in Dutch. Jack had spent enough time with van Hoek to know why: For all her bulk and shoddy construction, the Manila Galleon had not only survived; she had come through the storm in better condition than
Minerva
, or at least without losing any of her masts.

After that it hailed for two straight days. One of the older sailors remarked that hail never occurred far from land. The wind came about into their teeth, and as they’d been pushed by inscrutable currents dangerously close to thirty-five degrees, they had no choice but to sail northwest for a day. When the weather cleared and the trade-wind returned, and they were able to steer towards California again, someone sighted a school of tunny fish. All agreed that tunny never ventured far from land—all except for van Hoek, who only rolled his eyes.

The day after that they once again caught sight of the Manila Galleon in a mirage. This time—though the image was fleeting and warped—they saw a jab of flame, which probably meant that the Galleon had fired a cannon in an effort to signal them. All hands shushed each other, but if any sound reached
Minerva
it was drowned out by the shushing. Accordingly van Hoek refused to fire an answering signal; the Galleon, he said, might be a hundred miles away, and there was no point in wasting gunpowder.

That evening one far-sighted man insisted he saw a column of smoke to the southeast, which he took to be an infallible sign of land. Van Hoek said it was probably a waterspout. Still, several men loitered at that quarter of the ship, looking at it while the sun went down. Sunsets at this latitude, in November, were long and gradual, so they had plenty of time to look at this apparition, whatever it was, as the horizontal red light of dusk reflected from it.

Eventually the sun went down, of course, though some clouds high in the eastern sky continued to reflect back a faint glow for a while afterwards.

But there was one spot that refused to stop glowing, as if a spark of sun had flown off and gotten lodged there. It lay over the horizon, along the same bearing as the column of smoke or waterspout seen earlier. Van Hoek now revised his explanation: it was most likely an uncharted volcanic island in the middle of the Pacific. As such it might be naught more than a hot rock. On the other hand it might have streams of fresh water, and birds that could be shot and eaten. Every mouth on the ship was, in an instant, flooded with saliva. So he ordered a change in course, and had more canvas raised, since tomorrow weather might close in and make it difficult to see the volcano and easy to run aground on it.

At first he estimated the distance to the volcano at a hundred miles or more. But the light (which at first they’d seen only by its reflection on a cloud layer above) popped up over the horizon almost immediately, and van Hoek halved the estimate. Then, when flickerings in that light became clearly visible, he halved it again. Finally he declared that this was no volcano but something entirely different, and then everyone understood that, whatever it was, they were no more than a few miles away from it. Van Hoek ordered a prudent reduction in speed. Every man was abovedecks now, bumping into things because dazzled by the light.

They were close enough to see that it was an enormous fire that had by some miracle been kindled on the very surface of the ocean. Crackles and roars came out of it, and it billowed and stretched easily, sometimes drawing itself up and surging hundreds of yards
straight up into the air, other times growing squat and spreading out over the hissing surface of the calm sea. At times black shapes became visible in its heart: suggestions of massive ribs, and a broken mast clothed in fire. Sparks of green, red, and blue flame appeared here and there as exotic Oriental pigments and minerals were reached by the flames.

At some point they could no longer deny that they were hearing screams.
“Socorro! Socorro!”
The Spanish word for
help
had a sorrowful rather than an urgent sound. There was sentiment for going in closer, but “We wait for the magazine” was all van Hoek would say. Jack saw a red-hot cannon finally break through the charcoal beams that were supporting it. It dropped clumsily into the bilge and ejaculated a vast cloud of steam that blurred and dimmed the fire-light. One man with a very loud voice was crying
“Socorro! Socorro!”
But then he changed over into some Latin prayer.

He was halfway through it when all of the gunpowder on the Manila Galleon exploded at once. Flaming planks streaked away in every direction, blazing with the white heat of a forge as air shrieked over them, rapidly burning away to black cinders that plopped and sizzled in the water all around. Some landed on the ship and burnt little holes through her sails or started small fires on her deck, but van Hoek had long since ordered men to stand by with buckets, and so all flames were smartly doused.

It was near dawn before they could mount any serious attempt to look for survivors. The longboat had been taken apart and stowed, and in the darkness it took hours to get its pieces out, put it together, and launch it. Though no one came out and said as much, it was understood (as how could it not be) that everyone aboard
Minerva
was starving to death
to begin with
and that matters would only get worse with each survivor that was plucked out of the water.

At dawn they set out in the longboat and began rowing toward what had been the Galleon. She had burnt to the waterline, and now was just a shoe, a sole afloat in the Pacific, likely to fill up and sink as soon as the seas rose. Curls of cinnamon-bark dotted the surface of the water, each one looking like a small burnt ship itself. Around the hulk spread a morass of Chinese silk, ruined by fire and sea-water but still more gaily colored than anything their eyes had seen since their final whorehouse-visits in Manila four months earlier. The silk caught on the longboat’s oars and came out of the water with each stroke, giving them gorgeous glimpses of tropical birds and flowers before sliding off and sinking into the gray Pacific. A map floated on the surface, a square of white parchment no longer parched. Its ink was dissolving, images of land, parallels, and meridians fading away
until it became a featureless white square. Jack fished it up with a boat-hook and held it above his head. “What a stroke of luck!” he exclaimed, “I do believe this map shows our exact location!” But no one laughed.

“M
Y NAME,” SAID THE SURVIVOR,
speaking in French, “is Edmund de Ath. I thank you for inviting me to share your mess.”

It was three days since Jack had pulled him out of the drink and slung him over one of the longboat’s benches; this was the first time de Ath had emerged from his berth since then. His voice was still hoarse from inhaling smoke and swallowing salt-water. He had joined Jack, Moseh, Vrej, Dappa, Monsieur Arlanc, and van Hoek in the dining cabin, which was the largest and aft-most cabin on the quarterdeck; its back wall was a subtly curved sweep of windows twenty feet wide, affording a splendid view of the sun setting into the Western Pacific. The visitor was drawn inevitably to those windows, and stood there for a few moments with the ruddy light emphasizing the pits and hollows of his face. If he put on two or three stone—which he was likely to do when they reached New Spain—he’d be handsome. As it was, his skull stood a bit too close to the surface. But then the same was true of every man aboard this ship.

“Everything is idiotically plain and stark here, and that goes for the view as well,” Jack said. “A line between water and sky, and an orange ball poised above it.”

“It is Japanese in its simplicity,” said Edmund de Ath gravely, “and yet if you only look deeper, Barock complexity and ornament are to be found—observe the tufts of cloud scudding in below the Orb, the delicate curtseying of the waves as they meet—” and then he was off in high-flown French that Jack could not really follow; which prompted Monsieur Arlanc to say “I gather from your
accent
that you are Belgian.” Edmund de Ath (1) took this as an insult of moderate severity but (2) was too serene and poised to be troubled by it unduly. With Christian forbearance he responded with something like, “And I gather from the company you keep, monsieur, that you are one of those whose conscience led him to forsake the complexity and contradictions of the Roman church for the simplicity of a rebel creed.” That this Belgian friar refrained from using the word
heretic
was noted silently by every man in the cabin. Again he and Arlanc went off into deep French. But van Hoek was clearing his throat a lot and so Jack finally broke in: “The maggots, weevils, mealworms, and mold in those serving-dishes aren’t going to keep fresh all night!”