The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, Page 38

  The door of Tall House, where Master de Zoet lives, is ajar. Behind the side door is a large, locked room full of empty crates and barrels. I knock on the lowest step, as usual, and expect to hear Master de Zoet’s voice calling, “Is that you, Weh?” But today, there is no reply. Surprised, I climb the stairs, making enough noise to warn him that I am coming. Still there is no greeting. Master de Zoet rarely takes a siesta, but perhaps the heat has overcome him this afternoon. On the landing, I cross the side room where the house interpreter lives during the trading season. Master de Zoet’s door is half open, so I peer in. He is sitting at his low table. He does not notice me. His face is not his own today. The light in his eyes is dark. He is afraid. His lips are half mouthing silent words. On my home island, we would say that he has been cursed by a bad kwaio.

  Master de Zoet is staring at a scroll in front of him.

  It is not a white man’s book but a yellow man’s scroll.

  I am too far away to see well, but the letters on it are not Dutch ones.

  It is yellow man’s writing—Master Yang used such letters.

  Next to the scroll on Master de Zoet’s table is a notebook. Some Chinese words are written next to Dutch words. I make this guess: Master de Zoet has been translating the scroll into his own language. This has freed a bad curse, and this bad curse has possessed him.

  Master de Zoet senses I am here, and he looks up.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CAPTAIN PENHALIGON’S CABIN ABOARD HMS PHOEBUS, EAST CHINA SEA

  Around three o’clock on October 16, 1800

  INDEED IT SEEMS, JOHN PENHALIGON READS, THAT NATURE purposely designed these islands to be a sort of little world, separate and independent of the rest, by making them of so difficult an access, and by endowing them plentifully, with whatever is requisite to make the lives of their Inhabitants both delightful and pleasant, and to enable them to subsist without a commerce with foreign Nations …

  The captain yawns and cricks his jaw. Lieutenant Hovell declares there to be no better text on Japan than Engelbert Kaempfer’s and never mind its age; but by the time Penhaligon staggers to the end of one sentence, its beginning has receded into fog. Through the stern window he studies the ominous, busy horizon. His whale’s-tooth paperweight rolls off his desk, and he hears Wetz, the sailing master, ordering the topgallants trimmed. None too soon, thinks the captain. The Yellow Sea has changed color from this morning’s robin’s-egg blue to ordure gray, with a sky of scabby pewter.

  Where is Chigwin, he wonders, and where is my damned coffee?

  Penhaligon retrieves his paperweight and pain bites his right ankle.

  He squints at his barometer, whose needle is stuck to the “g” of “Changeable.”

  The captain returns to Engelbert Kaempfer to pick at a knot of illogic: the corollary of the phrase “whatever is requisite” is that man’s needs are universal, whereas, in truth, a king’s requisites differ radically from a reed cutter’s; a libertine’s from an archbishop’s; and his own from his grandfather’s. He opens his notebook and, bracing himself against the swell, writes:

  What prophet of commerce in, let us say, the Year 1700 could have foreseen a time when commoners consume tea by the bucket and sugar by the sack? What subject of William and Mary could have predicted the “need” of today’s middling multitudes for cotton sheets, coffee, and chocolate? Human requisites are prone to fashion; and, as clamoring new needs replace old ones, the face of the world itself changes …

  It is too rough to write, but John Penhaligon is pleased and his gout has calmed down again, for now. A rich vein. He takes out his shaving mirror from his escritoire. Sweetmeat pies have fattened the fellow in the glass, brandy reddened his complexion, grief sunk his eyes, and bad weather blasted away his thatch, but what restores a man’s vigor—and name—better than success?

  He sketches his first speech at Westminster. One recalls that the Phoebus, he shall inform their enrapt lordships, then decides to amend. One recalls that my Phoebus was no five-decked ship of the line with an auditorium of thunder-spouting guns, but a modest frigate of twenty-four eighteen-pounders. Her mizzen had sprung in the Straits of Formosa, her cordage was tired, her canvas threadbare, half our supplies from Fort Cornwallis were rotted, and her geriatric pump wheezed like my lord Falmouth atop his disappointed whore, and to as little profit—the chamber shall erupt with laughter as his old enemy flees to die of shame in his stoat hole—but her heart, my lords, was English oak; and when we hammered on the bolted gates of Japan, we did so with that resolve for which our race is justly notorious. Their lordships’ hush shall grow reverential. The copper we seized from the perfidious Dutch on that October day was but a token. Our truest prize, and the legacy of the Phoebus, was a market, sirs, for the fruits of your mills, mines, plantations, and manufactories, and the gratitude of the Japanese Empire for rousing her from feudal somnambulance into our modern century. To claim that my Phoebus drew the political map of Eastern Asia anew is no hyperbole. Their lordships will nod their cluttered heads and declare, “Hear, hear!” Lord Admiral Penhaligon continues: This august chamber is cognizant of history’s diverse instruments of change: the diplomat’s tongue; treachery’s poison; a monarch’s mercy; a pope’s tyranny …

  By God, Penhaligon thinks, this is good: I must write it down later.

  … and it is nothing less than the greatest honor of my life that, in the first year of the nineteenth century, History chose one plucky ship, His Majesty’s frigate Phoebus, to open the doors of the most reclusive empire in the modern world—for the glory of His Majesty and the British Empire! By now every last bewigged bastard in the place—Whig, Tory, cross-bencher, bishop, general, and admiral alike—shall be jumping to his feet and roaring with applause.

  “Cap”—outside his door, Chigwin sneezes—“tain?”

  “I trust you disturb me with coffee, Chigwin.”

  His young steward, the son of a master shipwright at Chatham who overlooked an awkward debt, peers in. “Jones is grinding the beans now, sir: the cook’s had Old Harry of a time keeping the stove alight.”

  “It was coffee I ordered, Chigwin, not a mug of excuses!”

  “Aye, sir; sorry, sir; it should be just a few minutes more.” A slug trail of mucus glistens on Chigwin’s sleeve. “But those rocks Mr. Snitker made mention of are sighted to starboard, and Mr. Hovell thought as you may wish to survey them.”

  Don’t chew the boy’s head off. “Yes, I should.”

  “Would there be any instructions for dinner, sir?”

  “The lieutenants and Mr. Snitker shall dine with me tonight, so …”

  They steady themselves as the Phoebus plunges down a trough.

  “… bid Jones serve us up those chickens that are laying no more. I have no space for idlers on my ship, not even feathered ones.”

  PENHALIGON HAULS HIMSELF up the companionway to the spar deck, where the wind slams his face and inflates his lungs like a pair of new bellows. Wetz has the wheel, while lecturing a wobbly cluster of midshipmen on recalcitrant tillers in laboring seas. They salute the captain, who shouts into the wind, “What think you of the weather ahead, Mr. Wetz?”

  “Good news is, sir, the clouds’re scattering to the west; bad news is, the wind’s swung a point northerly and blows a couple of knots harder. Regarding the pump, sir, Mr. O’Loughlan’s fashioning a new chain, but he thinks there’s a new leak—rats chewed the devil aft of the powder magazine.”

  When not eating our victuals, thinks Penhaligon, they eat my ship.

  “Tell the boatswain to hold a miller-hunt. Ten tails buys an extra quart.”

  Wetz’s sneeze sprays a downwind midshipman. “The men’ll enjoy the sport.”

  Penhaligon crosses the rolling quarterdeck. It is in a slutty state: Snitker doubts the Japanese lookouts could distinguish an unkempt Yankee trader from a Royal Navy frigate with gunports blackened, but the captain is taking nothing for granted. Lieutenant Hovell stands at the taffrail, next to the dep
osed former chief of Dejima. Hovell senses the captain’s approach, turns and salutes.

  Snitker turns and nods, like an equal. He gestures toward the rocky islet, passing at a fair clip and a safe four or five hundred yards. “Torinoshima.”

  Torinoshima, Captain, thinks Penhaligon, but inspects the islet. Torinoshima is more a large rock than a little Gibraltar, plastered in guano and raucous with seabirds. It is cliff-bound on all sides, except for a stony scree fall to leeward, where a brave boat might attempt an anchorage. Penhaligon tells Hovell, “Ask our guest if he ever heard of a landing.”

  Snitker’s answer takes up two or three sentences.

  What a gagged, mud-slurping thing, thinks Penhaligon, is the Dutch tongue.

  “He thinks not, sir; he never heard of any attempted landing.”

  “His reply was more involved than that.”

  “‘None but a bloody-minded simpleton would chance his longboat,’ sir.”

  “My sensibilities are not so easily wounded, Mr. Hovell. In future, translate in full.”

  The first lieutenant looks awkward. “My apologies, Captain.”

  “Ask him if Holland or any nation lays claim to Torinoshima.”

  Snitker’s response to the question contains a sneer and the word “shogun.”

  “Our guest suggests,” explains Hovell, “that we consult with the shogun before planting our Union Jack up in all that bird shit.” More follows, with Hovell paying close attention and verifying a detail or two. “Mr. Snitker adds that Torinoshima is referred to as the ‘signpost to Japan,’ and if this wind keeps up, tomorrow we’ll catch sight of the ‘garden wall,’ the Goto Islands, subject to the lord of Hizen, in whose dominion Nagasaki is located.”

  “Ask him if the Dutch Company ever landed on the Goto Islands.”

  This question earns a longer answer.

  “He says, sir, that the company’s captains never provoked …”

  The three men grip the taffrail as the Phoebus plunges and bucks.

  “… never provoked the authorities so blatantly, sir, because Hidden—”

  A cascade of spray falls over the bow; a drenched sailor swears in Welsh.

  “—Hidden Christians still live there, so all comings and goings …”

  One of the midshipmen tumbles down the companionway with a yell.

  “… are watched by government spies, but no bumboats shall approach us lest the crew be executed as smugglers, along with their families.”

  Rise by plunge, Torinoshima diminishes in stature off the starboard stern. The captain, lieutenant, and traitor sink into their own thoughts. Shearwaters and terns hover, roll, and plunge. The fourth bell of the first dog watch is struck, bringing out the men of the larboard watch without lagging: word has spread that the captain is about. The off-duty men go belowdecks for two hours of make-and-mend.

  A narrow amber eye of sky opens on the southern horizon.

  “There, sir!” says Hovell, childlike for a moment. “Two dolphins!”

  Penhaligon sees nothing but heaving slate-blue waves. “Where?”

  “A third! A beauty!” Hovell points, aborts another syllable, and says, “Gone.”

  “Until dinnertime, then,” says Penhaligon to Hovell, moving away.

  “Ah, dinnertime,” repeats Snitker in English, and mimes drinking.

  Grant me patience—Penhaligon musters a thin smile—and coffee.

  THE PURSER LEAVES the cabin, having worked through the day’s subtractions to the pay book. His buzzing voice and charnel-house breath have left Penhaligon with a headache to match the pain in his foot. “The one thing worse than dealing with pursers,” his patron Captain Golding advised him many years ago, “is being one. Every company needs a figurehead of hatred: better it be him than you.”

  Penhaligon drains the silty dregs. Coffee sharpens my mind, he thinks, but burns my guts and strengthens my old enemy. Since leaving Prince of Wales Island, an unwelcome truth has become irrefutable: his gout is launching a second attack. The first occurred in Bengal last summer: the heat was monstrous, and the pain was monstrous. For a fortnight he could not endure even the light touch of a cotton sheet against his foot. A first attack of the ailment can be laughed away as a rite of passage, but after the second, a man risks being dubbed “a gouty captain,” and his prospects with the admiralty can be poleaxed. Hovell may harbor his suspicions, thinks Penhaligon, but daren’t air them; the wardrooms of the service are cluttered with first lieutenants orphaned by the premature loss of their patrons. Worse yet, Hovell may be tempted by a nimbler patron and jump ship, depriving Penhaligon of his finest officer and a future captain’s indebtedness. His second lieutenant, Abel Wren, well connected via his marriage to Commodore Joy’s ruthless daughter, will smack his lips at the thought of these unexpected vacancies. I am, then, Penhaligon concludes, engaged in a footrace against my gout. If I seize this year’s Dutch copper and, please, God, prize open the treasure box of Nagasaki before gout lays me low, my financial and political futures are assured. Otherwise, Hovell or Wren shall take the credit for bagging the copper and the trading post—or else the mission fails altogether and John Penhaligon retires to West Country obscurity and a pension of, at best, two hundred pounds a year, paid late and begrudgingly. In my darker hours, I declare, it appears that Lady Luck won me my captaincy eight years ago just for the private pleasure of squatting over me and voiding her bowels. First, Charlie mortgaged the remains of the family estate, took out debts in his younger brother’s name, and disappeared; second, his prize agent and banker absconded to Virginia; third, Meredith, his dear Meredith, died of typhus; and fourth, there was Tristram—vigorous, strident, respected, handsome Tristram—killed at Cape St. Vincent, leaving his father nothing but grief and the crucifix salvaged by the ship’s surgeon. And now comes the gout, he thinks, threatening even to wreck my career …

  “No.” Penhaligon picks up his shaving mirror. “We shall reverse our reverses.”

  THE CAPTAIN LEAVES his cabin just as the sentry—Banes or Panes is the man’s name—is relieved by another marine, Walker the Scot: the pair salute. On the gundeck, Waldron the gunner’s mate crouches by a cannon with a Penzance boy, Moff Wesley. In the gloom and noise of the heavy sea, they do not notice the eavesdropping captain. “Speak it back, then, Moff,” Waldron is saying. “First?”

  “Mop inside the barrel with the wet swab, sir.”

  “An’ if some sottish cock does a cack-thumbed job o’ that?”

  “He’ll miss embers from the last shot when we puts in the powder, sir.”

  “And blow a gunner’s arms off: I seen it once, an’ once ’ll do. Second?”

  “Put in the powder cartridge, sir, or else we pours it in loose.”

  “An’ is gunpowder brought hither by scamperin’ little piskies?”

  “No, sir: I fetches it from the aft magazine, sir, one charge at a time.”

  “So you do, Moff. An’ why we don’t keep a fat stash to hand is?”

  “One loose spark’d blow us all to piss-’n’-sh—pieces, sir. Third”—Moff counts on his fingers—“ram home the powder with a rammer, sir, an’ fourth is load up the shot, an’ fifth is ram in a wad after the shot, ’cause we may be rollin’ an’ the shot may roll out again into the sea, sir.”

  “An’ a right crew o’ Frenchmen we’d look then. Sixth?”

  “Roll out the gun, so the carriage front is hard against the bulwark. Seventh, quill down the touchhole. Eighth, it’s lit with a flintlock, an’ the flintman shouts ‘Clear!’ an’ the primin’ powder sets off the powder in the barrel an’ fires out the shot, and whatever’s in its way it blows to—kingdom come, sir.”

  “Which causes the gun carriage,” interjects Penhaligon, “to do what?”

  Waldron is as startled as Moff: he stands to salute too quickly and bangs his head. “Didn’t notice you, Captain; beggin’ your pardon.”

  “Which causes the gun carriage,” repeats Penhaligon, “to do what, Mr. Wesley?”

 
; “Recoil shoots it back, sir, till the breech ropes an’ cascabel stops it.”

  “What does a recoiling cannon do to a man’s leg, Mr. Wesley?”

  “Well … there’d not be much leg left if it caught it, sir.”

  “Carry on, Mr. Waldron.” Penhaligon continues along the starboard bulwark, recalling his own days as a powder monkey and steadying himself on an overhead rope. At five-foot-eight, he is much taller than the average sailor and must take care not to scalp himself on the deckheads. He regrets his lack of a private fortune or prize money to buy gunpowder for firing practice. Captains who use more than a third of their quota in this way are viewed by the sea lords as imprudent.

  Six Hanoverians whom Penhaligon plucked off a whaler at St. Helena are doing their best to wash, wring out, and hang up spare hammocks in the rolling weather. They intone, “Capitarn,” in one chorus, and return to industrious silence. Farther along, Lieutenant Abel Wren has men scrubbing the deck with hot vinegar and holystones. Up above is dirtied for camouflage, but belowdecks needs protection from mildew and bad airs. Wren whacks a sailor with his rattan and bellows, “Scrub it—don’t tickle it, you daisy!” He then pretends to notice the captain for the first time and salutes. “Afternoon, sir.”

  “Afternoon, Mr. Wren. All well?”

  “Never better, sir,” says the dashing, ugly second lieutenant.

  Passing the canvas-screened galley, Penhaligon peers through a loose flap into the sooty, steamy enclosure, where the messmen help the cook and his mate chop food, keep fires alight, and prevent the coppers overturning. The cook puts chunks of salt pork—Thursday being a pork day—into the bubbling mixture. Chinese cabbage, slabs of yam, and rice are added to thicken the stew. Sons of the gentry may turn up their noses at the starch-and-salt-rich victuals, but ratings eat and drink better than they would ashore. Penhaligon’s own cook, Jonas Jones, claps a few times to earn the galley’s attention. “The wagers’re all in now, boys.”