The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, Page 49

  My foot—the torture ebbs and flows—is becoming a calcified potato.

  The agonizing ten-pace journey, however, has quelled his bowels.

  Master of a frigate, he ponders, but not of his own intestines.

  Wavelets lap and nudge the hull, twenty feet below.

  Young women, they hide, he hums his shitty ditty, like birds in the bushes …

  Penhaligon twists the wedding ring, embedded in middle-aged plumpness.

  Young women, they hide, like birds in the bushes …

  Meredith died three years ago. His memory of her face is eroded.

  … and were I but a young man I’d go bang them bushes …

  Penhaligon wishes he had paid that portraitist his fifteen pounds …

  To my right fol-diddle-derol, to my right fol-diddle-dee.

  … but there were his brother’s debts to settle, and his own pay was late, again.

  He scratches a fiery itch between the knuckles of his left hand.

  A familiar acidity burns his sphincter. Hemorrhoids as well?

  “No time for self-pity,” he tells himself. “Letters of state must be written.”

  THE CAPTAIN LISTENS to the sentries call out, “Five bells, all well …” The oil in the lamp is low, but replenishing it will wake his gout, and he is too embarrassed to call Chigwin for so simple a task. His indecision is recorded on the blank sheets of paper. He summons his thoughts, but they scatter like sheep. Every great captain or admiral, he considers, possesses a celebratory location: Nelson has the Nile; Rodney has Martinique et al.; Jervis has Cape St. Vincent. “So why mayn’t John Penhaligon have Nagasaki?” One Dutch clerk named Jacob de Zoet, he thinks, is why; damn the wind that blew him this way …

  The warning in De Zoet’s letter, the captain concedes, was masterly.

  He watches a teardrop of ink fall from his quill back into the bottle.

  To heed the warning would place me in his debt.

  Unexpected rain smatters the sea and spatters the deck.

  But to ignore the warning could prove reckless …

  Wetz has the larboard watch tonight: he orders out the awnings and barrels to catch the rain.

  … and lead not to an Anglo-Japanese accord but an Anglo-Japanese war.

  He thinks of Hovell’s scenario of Siamese traders in the Bristol Channel.

  Sixty days would be required for Parliament to send an answer, yes.

  He has rubbed a mosquito bite on his knuckle into an angry lump.

  He looks into his shaving mirror: his grandfather looks back.

  There are “known foreigners,” he thinks, and “foreign foreigners.”

  Against the French, Spaniards, or Dutch, one buys intelligence from spies.

  The lamp spits, falters, and snuffs out. The cabin is hooded by night.

  De Zoet, he sees, has deployed one of his best weapons.

  “A short sleep,” the captain advises himself, “may dispel the fog.”

  THE SENTRIES CALL, “Two bells, two bells, all well …” Penhaligon’s sweat-sodden sheet is twisted around him like a spider’s cocoon. Down on the berth deck the larboard watch will be asleep, their hammocks strung shoulder to shoulder, with their dogs, cats, and monkeys.

  The sheep, two goats, and half dozen chickens are asleep.

  The nocturnal rats are probably at work in the provisions holds.

  Chigwin, in his cubbyhole shy of the captain’s door, is asleep.

  Surgeon Nash is asleep, down in his warm snug bunk on the orlop.

  Lieutenant Hovell, who has the starboard watch tonight, will be alert, but Wren, Talbot, and Cutlip may sleep through to the morning.

  Jacob de Zoet, the captain imagines, is being pleasured by a courtesan: Peter Fischer swears he keeps a harem at the company’s expense.

  “Hatred eats haters,” Meredith told an infant Tristram, “like ogres eat boys.”

  May Meredith be in heaven now, embroidering cushions …

  The rhythmic crank of the Phoebus’s chain pump starts up.

  Wetz must have told Hovell to keep an eye on the bilge.

  Heaven is a thorny proposition, he thinks, best enjoyed at a distance.

  Chaplain Wily is evasive about whether heaven’s seas are like earth’s.

  Would Meredith not be happier, he asks, with a little cottage of her own?

  Sleep kisses his eyelids. The dreamlight is dappled. He trots up his old mistress’s stairs on Brewer Street. The girl’s voice shimmers. “You’re in the newspaper, Johnny.” He takes up today’s Times and reads: Admiral Sir John Penhaligon, late of the HM Frigate Phoebus, told their lordships how, upon receiving the Nagasaki magistrate’s order to surrender his gunpowder, he suspected foul play. “There being no prize to seize from Dejima,” Admiral Penhaligon avowed, “and Dutch and Japanese alike preventing us trading via Dejima, it became necessary to turn our guns on Dejima.” In the Commons, Mr. Pitt praised the admiral’s bold actions for “ministering the coup de grâce on Dutch mercantilism in the Far East.”

  Penhaligon sits up in his cabin, bangs his head, and laughs aloud.

  THE CAPTAIN STRUGGLES onto the spar deck with Talbot’s assistance. His stick is no longer an aid but a necessity: the gout is a tight bandage of gorse and nettles. The morning is dry but damp; fat-hulled, barnacled clouds are overladen with rain. Three Chinese ships slip along the opposite shore, bound for the city. You’re in for a pretty spectacle, he promises the Chinamen, as like as not …

  Two dozen landsmen sit along the waist under the sailmaker’s orders. They salute their captain, noticing his bandaged foot, too swollen and painful to tolerate a boot or shoe. He hobbles to the watch officer’s station at the wheel, where Wetz is balancing a bowl of coffee against the Phoebus’s gentle rocking. “Good morning, Mr. Wetz. Anything to report?”

  “We filled ten butts with rainwater, sir, and the wind’s swung north.”

  Greasy steam and a cloud of obscenities escape the galley vent.

  Penhaligon peers at the guard boats. “And our tireless sentinels?”

  “Circling us the whole night through, sir, as they are now.”

  “I would hear your thoughts, Mr. Wetz, on a speculative maneuver.”

  “Oh, sir? Then perhaps Lieutenant Talbot might take the wheel.”

  Wetz walks and Penhaligon limps to the quarterdeck taffrail.

  “Could you bring us in to within three hundred yards of Dejima?”

  Wetz gestures toward the Chinese junks. “If they can, sir, we can.”

  “Could you hold us steady for three minutes without anchors?”

  Wetz assesses the wind’s strength and direction. “Child’s play.”

  “And how soon could we beat down the bay to the open sea?”

  “Would we be”—the sailing master squints at the distances in both directions—“fighting our way out, sir, or tacking unimpaired?”

  “My pet sybil has a head cold: I can’t prize a word from her.”

  Master Wetz clicks at the panorama like a plowman to a mare. “Conditions unchanged, Captain … I’d have us out in fifty minutes.”

  “ROBERT.” PENHALIGON SPEAKS around his pipe. “I disturb your rest. Come in.”

  The unshaven first lieutenant rolled from his bunk seconds ago. “Sir.” Hovell closes the cabin door against the din of a hundred and fifty sailors eating ship’s biscuit dipped in ghee. “They do say, ‘A well-rested first officer is a neglectful first officer.’ May I inquire after your …” He looks at Penhaligon’s bandaged foot.

  “Swollen as a puffball, but Mr. Nash has filled me to my gills with his remedy, so I shall stay afloat for today, which may well be time enough.”

  “Oh, sir? How so?”

  “I authored a couple of missives overnight. Might you peruse them for me? The letters are weighty, for all their brevity. I’d not want them marred by misspellings, and you are the closest to a man of letters the Phoebus can offer.”

  “Honored to oblige, sir, though the chaplain is a b
etter-read—”

  “Read them aloud, please, so I may hear how they carry.”

  Hovell begins: “‘To Jacob de Zoet, Esquire: Firstly, Dejima is not a ‘Provisional Republic’ but a remote factory whose former owner, the Dutch East Indies Company, is defunct. Secondly, you are not a president but a shopkeeper who, by promoting himself over Deputy Chief Peter Fischer during his brief absence, violates the constitution of the said company.’ A strong point, Captain. ‘Thirdly, whilst my orders are to occupy Dejima by diplomatic or military means, should these prove impossible, I am obliged to place the trading post beyond use.’” Hovell looks up in surprise.

  “We are almost finished, Lieutenant Hovell.”

  “‘Strike your flag upon receipt of this letter and have yourself transferred to the Phoebus by noon, where you shall enjoy the privileges of a gentleman prisoner of war. Ignore this demand, however, and you sentence Dejima to …’” Hovell pauses. “‘… to total demolition. Faithfully, et cetera …’”

  Sailors with swabs pound dry the quarterdeck over the captain’s cabin.

  Hovell returns the letter. “There are no errors of grammar or diction, sir.”

  “We are alone, Robert, so you need not be coy.”

  “Some may consider such a bluff to be a touch too … bold?”

  “No bluff. If Dejima is not to be British, it is to be nobody’s.”

  “Were these our original orders from the governor in Bengal, sir?”

  “‘Plunder or trade as circumstances permit and your initiative advises.’ Circumstances conspire against both plunder and trade. Beating a retreat with our tail between our legs is not an agreeable prospect, so I fall back on my initiative.”

  Somewhere nearby, a dog barks and a monkey screeches.

  “Captain—you will have considered the repercussions?”

  “It is a day for Jacob de Zoet to learn about repercussions.”

  “Sir, as I am invited to speak my mind, I must say that an unprovoked attack on Dejima shall taint Japan’s view of Great Britain for two generations.”

  “Taint” and “unprovoked,” notes Penhaligon, are incautious words. “Were you insensible to the deliberate offense in the magistrate’s letter yesterday?”

  “It disappointed, but the Japanese did not invite us to Nagasaki.”

  One must be wary of understanding one’s enemy, Penhaligon thinks, lest one becomes him.

  “The second letter, sir, is to Magistrate Shiroyama, I presume.”

  “You presume right.” The captain hands over the page.

  “‘To Magistrate Shiroyama. Sir: Mr. Fischer extended to you the hand of friendship from the crown and government of Great Britain. This hand was slapped away. No British captain surrenders his gunpowder nor tolerates foreign inspectors in his holds. Your proposed quarantine for HMS Phoebus violates common practice between civilized nations. I am, however, willing to overlook the offense, provided that Your Honor meets the following conditions: deliver, by noon, the Dutchman Jacob de Zoet to the Phoebus; install Envoy Fischer as the chief resident of Dejima; retract your unacceptable demands regarding our gunpowder and inspections. Without all three conditions are met, the Dutch shall be punished for their intransigence, as the rules of war permit, and incidental damage to property or persons shall be to Your Honor’s account. Regretfully, et cetera, Captain Penhaligon of the Royal Navy of the British Crown.’ Well, sir, this is …”

  A throbbing vein in Penhaligon’s foot hurts almost exquisitely.

  “… as unambiguous,” says the lieutenant, “as the first letter, sir.”

  Where, thinks the captain, with anger and sorrow, is my grateful young protégé? “Translate the magistrate’s letter into Dutch, in all haste, then have Peter Fischer rowed to one of the guard boats so he may deliver them.”

  “‘SOON AFTERWARD,’” Lieutenant Talbot, sitting on the window seat of the captain’s cabin, reads aloud from Kaempfer’s book while Rafferty, the surgeon’s mate, scrapes a razor over the captain’s jowls, “‘in 1638, this heathen court had no qualms in inflicting upon the Dutch a cursed test to find out whether the orders of the shogun or the love of their fellow Christians had greater power over them. It was a matter of us serving the empire by helping to destroy the native Christians, of whom those remaining, some forty thousand people, in desperation over their martyrdom had moved into an old fortress in the province of’”—Talbot hesitates over the word—“‘of Shimabara and made preparations to defend themselves. The head of the Dutch’”—Talbot falters again—“‘Koekebacker, himself went to the location and in fourteen days treated the beleaguered Christians to four hundred and twenty-six rough cannon salvoes both from land and sea.’”

  “I knew as how the Dutch’re niggardly bastards.” Rafferty tweaks Penhaligon’s nasal hair with his surgeon’s scissors. “But that they’d slaughter Christians for trading rights nigh on beggars belief, Captain. Why not sell your old mum to a vivisectionist at the same time?”

  “They are Europe’s most unprincipled race. Mr. Talbot?”

  “Aye, sir: ‘This assistance resulted neither in surrender nor complete defeat, but broke the strength of the besieged. And because the Japanese had the pleasure to order it, the Dutch factor stripped the vessel of a further six cannons—regardless of the fact that she still had to navigate dangerous seas—so the Japanese might carry out their cruel designs …’ One wonders whether these cannons could be those same toys adorning the bay’s gun placements, sir.”

  “Possibly so, Mr. Talbot. Possibly so.”

  Rafferty rubs Pears soap around the captain’s cheekbone.

  Major Cutlip enters. “The new guard boat is approaching no closer than the old, Captain, and there’s no sign of De Zoet. Their flag on Dejima is still flying, cocky as a thumbed nose.”

  “We shall chop off that thumb,” promises Penhaligon, “and slice that nose.”

  “They’re evacuating Dejima, too, carting away what can be carted.”

  Then their decision is made, he thinks. “The hour, Mr. Talbot?”

  “The hour, sir … a sliver after half past ten, Captain.”

  “Lieutenant Wren, tell Mr. Waldron that unless we hear from shore—”

  A loud commotion in Dutch breaks out in the passageway.

  “Not without,” Banes or Panes is shouting, “the captain’s say-so!”

  Fischer’s voice shouts a line of angry Dutch ending in “Envoy!”

  “The Hanoverian lads may have told him,” muses Cutlip, “what’s afoot.”

  “Shall I fetch Lieutenant Hovell, sir?” asks Talbot. “Or Smeyers?”

  “If the Japanese refuse our overtures, what need have we of Dutch?”

  Fischer’s voice reaches them: “Captain Penhaligon! We talk!”

  “Sauerkraut may stave off scurvy,” says the captain, “but a sour Kraut—”

  Rafferty chuckles noxious fumes through his nose.

  “—is more a hindrance than help. Tell him I’m busy, Major. If he doesn’t understand ‘busy,’ then make him understand.”

  AT FIVE MINUTES to noon, bedecked in his dress coat with gold braiding and tricorn hat, Penhaligon addresses the company on the spar deck. “As in war, men, events move quickly in foreign parts. This morning shall see an engagement. There’s no call for a grand eve-of-battle speech, men. I foresee a short, noisy, one-sided affair. Yesterday we extended to the Japanese the hand of friendship. They spat at it. Ungallant? Yes. Unwise? I think so. Punishable under the laws of civilized nations? Alas, no. No, this morning’s business is to punish the Dutch”—a ragged cheer comes from some of the older men—“that band of castaways, to whom we offered work and free passage. They responded with an insolence no Englishman can overlook.”

  Sheets of drizzle tumble through the air down the mountains.

  “Were we anchored off Hispaniola or the Malabar coast, we would reward the Dutch by seizing compensation and naming this deep-water bay King George Harbor. The Dutch reckon that I shan’t hazard th
e best crew of my career by raiding Dejima at one o’clock just to yield it by five o’clock, and to this extent they are right: Japan has more warriors, ultimately, than the Phoebus has balls of shot.”

  One of the two guard boats is sculling back toward Nagasaki.

  Row as fast as you might, the captain tells it, you’ll not outrun my Phoebus.

  “But by reducing Dejima to rubble, we reduce the myth of Dutch potency to rubble. Once the dust is settled, and lessons drawn, a future British mission to Nagasaki, perhaps as soon as next year, shall not be rebuffed so brusquely again.”

  “If, Captain,” asks Major Cutlip, “the natives attempt to board us?”

  “Fire warning shots, but should these be ignored, you may demonstrate the power and precision of British rifles. Kill as few as possible.”

  Gunner Waldron raises his hand. “Sir, it’s likely some shots’ll overshoot.”

  “Our target is Dejima, but should any shots, by accident, fall on Nagasaki—”

  Penhaligon senses Hovell at his side, bristling with disapproval.

  “—then the Japanese will choose allies more prudently. So let’s give this despotic backwater a taste of the coming century.” Among the faces in the rigging, Penhaligon sees Hartlepool’s, looking down on him like a brown-skinned angel. “Show this pox-blasted pagan port what ruin a British dog of war can inflict upon an enemy when its righteous ire is roused!”

  Nearly three hundred men gaze at their captain with fierce respect.

  He glances at Hovell, but Hovell is looking toward Nagasaki.

  “Gun crews to your posts! Take us in, Mr. Wetz, if you please.”

  TWENTY MEN TURN the windlass; the cable groans; the anchor rises. Wetz shouts orders at the ratings as they swarm up the shrouds.

  “A well-run ship,” Captain Golding used to say, “is a floating opera …”

  The spritsails and jibsails drop open; the jibboom enjoys the stretch.

  “… whose director is the captain yet whose conductor is the sailing master.”

  Down come the foremast and main courses; now the topsails …

  The Phoebus’s bones tauten and her joints creak as the strain is taken.