The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (240 page)

The only food remaining on the ship was beef jerky, some dried fish, beans, and biscuit. These were steadily being converted into
cockroaches, worms, maggots, and weevils. They had long since stopped observing any difference between food that had and that had not undergone the conversion, and ate both in the same mouthful.

“According to my faith, I am not allowed to eat any
flesh
on Friday,” said Edmund de Ath, “and so someone else may have my portion of
beans
.” He was gazing bemusedly at a raft of maggots that had floated to the surface of his bowl. Van Hoek’s face grew red when he understood that their new passenger was making jests about the food, but before the Dutchman would leap up and get his hands around the throat of the Belgian, Edmund de Ath raised his eyes to the red horizon, delved blindly with his spoon, and brought a stew of beans and bugs to his mouth. “It is better fare than I have had in a month,” he announced. “My compliments, Captain van Hoek, on your
logistical
acumen. Rather than trusting to some
saint
as the Spanish captains do, you have used the brain God gave you, and provisioned the ship
responsibly.
”

The diplomacy of de Ath only seemed to make van Hoek more suspicious. “What sort of Papist are you, to make light of your own faith?”

“Make light of it? Never, sir. I am a Jansenist. I seek reconciliation with certain Protestants, finding their faith nearer truth than the sophistry of the Jesuits. But I would not bore you with tedious
theologickal
discourse—”

“How about Jews?” asked Moseh gravely. “We could use an extra Jew on this ship, if you could stretch your principles
that
far.”

“I will not stretch my principles, but I will stretch my
mind,
” said Edmund de Ath, refusing to be baited. “Tell me, what do the
rebbes
say concerning the eating of larvae? Kosher, or
trayf
?”

“I have been thinking of writing a scholarly treatise on that very subject,” said Moseh, “but I need access to certain rabbinical writings that are not available in Captain van Hoek’s library of nautical lore and picaresque novels.”

Everyone laughed—even Monsieur Arlanc, who was hard at work grinding a fragment of boiled jerky against the tabletop with the butt of his dagger. His last remaining tooth had fallen out a week ago and so he had to chew his food manually.

They had spent so many years together that they had nothing to say to one another, and so this new fellow—whether they liked him or not—held their attention fast, no matter what he did or said. Even when he was answering Vrej Esphahnian’s questions about Jansenist views towards the Armenian Orthodox Church, they could not look at anything else.

After dinner, hot sugar-water was brought out. Dappa finally broached the subject they all wanted to hear about. “Monsieur de Ath, you seemed to take a dim view of the Manila Galleon’s management. Without intending disrespect for the recently departed, I would like to know how the disaster came about.”

Edmund de Ath brooded for a while. The sun had set and candles had been lit; his face stood out pale, floating in the darkness above the table. “That ship was as
Spanish
as this one is
Dutch,
” he said. “The overall situation was more desperate, as the ship was slowly disintegrating and the passengers were unruly. But the atmosphere was gay and cheerful, as everyone aboard had given themselves over to the verdict of Fortune. The chief distinction between that ship and this is that
this
is a single unitary Enterprise whereas the Manila Galleon belonged to the King of Spain and was a sort of floating bazaar—a commercial Ark supporting diverse business interests, many of which were naturally at odds. Just as Noah must have had his hands full keeping the tigers away from the goats, so the Captain of the Galleon was forever trying to adjudicate among the warring and intriguing
commerçants
packed into her cabins.

“You’ll recollect that a few days ago we had two days of hailstorms. Several of the merchants who’d bought passage on the Galleon had brought aboard servants from balmy climes where cold air and hailstones are unheard of. These wretches were so unnerved by the hail that they fled belowdecks and secreted themselves deep in the hold and would not be fetched out for anything. In time the weather cleared, and they emerged to be soundly beaten by their masters. But about the same time, smoke was observed seeping out from one of the hatches. It appears likely that one of those servants had brought a candle below with him when he had gone down fleeing the hailstorm. Perhaps they had even kindled a cook-fire. The truth will never be known. In any event, it was now obvious that a slow smoldering fire had been started somewhere down amid the countless bales of cargo that the merchants had stuffed into the hold.”

Van Hoek rose and excused himself, for from the point of view of ship’s captain the story was finished. There was no point in hearing the details. The others remained and listened.

“Now, many ponderous sermons could be written about the rich pageant of greed and folly that played out over the next days. The correct action would have been to man the pumps and drench everything in the hold with sea-water. But this would have ruined all of the silks, and caused incalculable losses, not only for the merchants but for the ship’s officers, and various of the King’s officials in Manila and Acapulco who had bales of their own in the hold. So the captain
delayed, and the fire smoldered on. Men were sent below with buckets of water to find and douse the fire. Some returned saying that the smoke was too thick—others never came back at all. Some argued that the hatches should be opened and bales brought out onto the deck, but others who had more knowledge of fires said that this would allow an in-rush of air that would cause the fire to billow up and consume the Galleon in a moment.

“We sighted your ship in a mirage, and fired a signal-cannon hoping you would come to our aid. There was disagreement even concerning this, for some supposed you were Dutch pirates. But the captain told us that you were a
merchant
-ship loaded with quicksilver, and confessed he had made an agreement with you in secret, that he would guide you across the Pacific and grease the path for you in Acapulco in return for a share of your profits.”

“Was everyone shocked and dismayed?”

“No one batted an eye. The signal cannon was fired forthwith. No answer came back to our ears: only the silence of the Pacific. At this, madness descended on the Galleon like a Plague. There was an insurrection—not merely a mutiny but a three-sided civil war. Again, someday it will make for a great allegory-tale that preachers may recite from pulpits, but the way it came out was that those who wanted to unload the cargo-hold prevailed. Hatches were opened—smoke came out, which you must have seen on the horizon—a few bales were hoisted out—and then, just as some had predicted, flames erupted from below. I saw the very air burning. A boiling flame-front came towards me, trapping me against the rail, and I toppled overboard rather than be roasted alive. I climbed onto one of the bales that had been thrown overboard. The ship crept downwind, slowly getting farther away from me, and I watched the final catastrophe from a safe distance.”

Edmund de Ath bowed his head slightly, so that arcs of reflected candle-light gleamed in the tear-filled channels beneath his eyes. “May Almighty God have mercy on the hundred and seventy-four men and the one woman who perished.”

“You may scratch the one woman off that list, at least for the time being,” Jack said. “We plucked her out of the water fifteen minutes after you.”

There was a long pause, and then Edmund de Ath said: “Elizabeth de Obregon survived?”

“If you call this surviving,” Jack answered.

“H
E
SWALLOWED
!” SAID
M
ONSIEUR
A
RLANC
the next day, having cornered Jack up at the head. “I saw his Adam’s apple move.”

“Of course he swallowed—he was eating dinner.”

“Dinner was finished!”

“All right, he was drinking sugar-water then.”

“It was not that sort of a swallow,” said Monsieur Arlanc. “I mean he was perturbed. Something is not right.”

“Now Monsieur Arlanc, consider it: What could de Ath possibly find troubling about the poor lady’s survival? She’s half out of her mind anyway.”

“People who are half out of their minds sometimes forget discretion, and say things they would normally keep secret.”

“All right, then, perhaps he and the lady were having a scandalous
affair de coeur
—that would explain why he’s been sitting at her bedside ever since.”

Jack was sitting in a hole, his buttocks dangling over the Pacific, and Monsieur Arlanc was standing next to him; together they gazed down the length of the ship for a few moments. The several divisions and subdivisions of the current watch were distributed among the masts and sail-courses, running through a drill that every man knew in his sleep, trimming the sails for new weather that was bearing down on them out of the northwest. Their limbs were swollen from beri-beri and many of them moved in spasmodickal twitches as their feet and hands responded balkily to commands from the mind. On the upperdeck, in the middle of the ship, a dozen Malabaris were standing around a corpse stitched up in a sheet, joining in some sort of heathenish mourning-chant prepatory to flinging it overboard. A scrap of cordage had been lashed around its ankles and made fast to an empty drinking water jar packed with pot-shards and ballast-sand, so that the body would be pulled smartly down to David Jones’s Locker before the sharks who swarmed in the ship’s wake could make sport with it.

“We gained two mouths from the Galleon, and fretted about going hungry on that account,” Jack mused. “Since then three have died.”

“There must be some reason for you to sit there and tell me things of which I am already aware,” said Monsieur Arlanc, mumbling pensively through swollen gums, “but I cannot fathom it.”

“If strong sailors are dropping dead, what chance has Elizabeth de Obregon?”

Monsieur Arlanc spat blood over the rail. “More chance than I have. She has endured a voyage that would slay any man on this ship.”

“Are you trying to tell me that there is a worse voyage in all the
world than
this
one?”

“She is the sole survivor of the squadron that was sent out from Acapulco years ago, to find the Islands of Solomon.”

Now Jack was glad in a way that he was sitting on the head, for it was a pose well-suited to profound silent contemplation. “Stab me!” he said finally. “Enoch told me of that expedition, and that the only survivor was a woman, but I had not drawn the connexion.”

“She has seen wonders and terrors known only to the
Spaniards
.”

“In any event she is very sick just now,” Jack said, “and so it is no wonder that Edmund de Ath sits at the lady’s bedside—we’d expect no less of a priest.”

“And nothing more of a
blackguard.
”

Jack sighed. The corpse went over-board. Several Filipino idlers—which meant tradesmen not attached to any particular watch—were arguing about ducks. A flight of ducks had been sighted in the distance this morning and several were of the opinion that ducks were never seen more than a few miles from land.

“It is in the nature of men cooped up together aboard ship that they fall to infighting at some point,” Jack finally said.

Monsieur Arlanc grinned, which was an unspeakably nasty sight: his gums had peeled back from his mandibles to show blackening bone. “It is some sort of poetic justice. You turn my faith against me by arguing that I am predestined to distrust Edmund de Ath.”

M
ONSIEUR
A
RLANC DIED
a week later. They held on to his corpse for as long as they could, because a fragment of kelp was sighted in the water almost at the moment of his death, and they hoped that they could make landfall and bury him in the earth of California. But his body had been well decayed even while he’d been still alive. Dying scarcely improved matters, and forced them to make another burial at sea. It was just as well that they did. For even though kelp-weeds continued to bob in the waves around Minerva’s hull, it was not for another ten days after they threw the Huguenot’s corpse overboard that they positively sighted land. They were just below thirty-nine degrees of latitude, which meant they’d missed Cape Mendocino; according to the vague charts that van Hoek had collected in Manila, and a few half-baked recollections of Edmund de Ath, the land they were looking at was probably Punto Arena.

Now the so-called idlers, who really had been idle for most of the last several weeks, worked night and day re-making
Minerva
for a coastal voyage. The anchors were brought up out of the hold and hung on the ship’s bow. Likewise cannons were hoisted up from storage
and settled on their carriages. The longboat was re-assembled and put on the upperdeck, an obstruction to the men of the watch but a welcome one. While these things were being done
Minerva
could not come too near the coast, and so they put the distant mountains of California to larboard and coasted southwards for two days, sieving kelp up out of the water and trying to find some way to make it palatable. There were clear signs of an approaching storm, but as luck had it, they were just drawing abreast of the entrance to the great bay of California. As the wind began to blow hard off the Pacific they scudded between two mighty promontories that were lit up by golden sunlight gliding in beneath the storm-clouds. Changing course to the south, they were then able to navigate between a few steep rocky islands and get through a sort of bottle-neck. Beyond it the bay widened considerably. It was lined with salt-pans reminiscent of those at Cadiz, though of course no one was exploiting these. They dropped anchor in the deepest water they could find and readied the ship to wait out the storm.