The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, Page 42

A cormorant dives from steep black rocks a hundred yards away.

  “Verify once again the procedure that a Dutch ship might observe at this point.”

  Snitker’s reply is accompanied by gestures and pointed fingers.

  “A Dutch Company ship, sir,” says Hovell, “would sail in another half mile past the fortifications, which are saluted by a round from both bows. The longboat is then rowed out to meet the greeting party, consisting of two company sampans. Then all three boats return to the ship for the customary formalities.”

  “Exactly when may we expect our greeting party to embark from Dejima?”

  The answer, accompanied by a shrug, is, “Perhaps a quarter hour, sir.”

  “To be clear: the party is composed of Japanese and Dutch officials?”

  Snitker answers in English: “Japanese and Dutch, ja.”

  “Ask how many swordsmen accompany the party, Mr. Hovell.”

  The answer is involved, and the first lieutenant must clarify a couple of points. “All the officials on the boat carry swords, but primarily to denote their rank. For the most part, they resemble a country squire at home who talks tough but wouldn’t know a sword from a darning needle.”

  Major Cutlip has no inhibitions. “If you’d like us to bag you a few hostages, sir, we’d have those jabbering monkeys for a second breakfast.”

  Curse Cornwallis, thinks the captain, for encumbering me with this ass.

  “Dutch hostages,” Hovell addresses him, “may strengthen our hand, but—”

  “One bloodied Japanese nose,” agrees Penhaligon, “may dash any hopes of a treaty for years: yes, I know. Kaempfer’s book has impressed upon me the pride of this race, if nothing else. But I judge the risk worthwhile. Our disguise is a short-term expediency, and without better and less-partial intelligence”—he glances at Daniel Snitker, who is studying the city through his telescope—“about conditions ashore, we are blind men trying to outwit the sighted.”

  “And the possibility of a concealed Indiaman, sir?” asks Lieutenant Wren.

  “If there is one, let it wait. She shan’t slip past us without our knowledge. Mr. Talbot, bid the coxswain to ready the longboat but not to lower her yet.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Mr. Malouf,” Penhaligon says, turning to a midshipman, “bid Mr. Wetz take us in past those toy fortifications by a half mile, but bid him take his time …”

  “Aye, sir: in by a half mile, sir.” Malouf hurries to Wetz at the wheel, leaping over a coil of crusty rope.

  The sooner I can have the deck scrubbed, thinks the captain, the better.

  “Mr. Waldron.” He turns to the bovine master gunner. “Our guns are ready?”

  “On both bows, Captain, aye: tampions out, charge in, but no shot.”

  “Customarily, the Dutch salute the guard posts as they pass those bluffs—see?”

  “That I do, sir. Shall I have the lads below do the same?”

  “Aye, Mr. Waldron, and though I neither want nor desire action today …”

  Waldron waits while his captain chooses his words with care.

  “Keep your key to the shot lockers to hand. Fortune favors the prepared.”

  “Aye, sir, we’ll be ready.” Waldron goes below to the gundeck.

  Aloft, the topmen shout to one another as a topgallant is lowered.

  Wetz is firing off a volley of orders in all directions.

  Canvas stiffens, the Phoebus moves forward; her timbers and cordage creak.

  A cormorant preens its feathers on the frigate’s dolphin-spiker.

  The leadsman calls, “By the mark nine!” The number is conveyed to Wetz.

  Penhaligon studies the shore through his telescope, noting the lack of a castle keep or donjon in Nagasaki. “Mr. Hovell, pray ask Mr. Snitker this: were we to bring the Phoebus as close as we dared to Dejima, land forty men in two boats, and occupy the factory, would the Japanese consider Dutch soil to be taken or their own?”

  Snitker’s brief answer has a matter-of-fact tone. “He says he declines,” translates Hovell, “to guess the mind of Japanese authority.”

  “Ask whether he’d be willing to join such a raid.”

  Snitker’s interpreter translates his reply directly: “‘I am a diplomat and merchant, not a soldier,’ sir.” His reticence assuages Penhaligon’s fears that Snitker is hurrying them into an elaborate trap.

  “By the deep ten and a half!” calls the leadsman.

  The Phoebus is almost level with the guard posts on either shore, upon which the captain now trains his telescope. The walls are thin, the stockades low, and the cannons more dangerous to their gunmen than their targets.

  “Mr. Malouf, pray ask Mr. Waldron to give the order to fire our salute.”

  “Aye, sir: telling Mr. Waldron the order to fire the salute.” Malouf goes below.

  Penhaligon has his first clear sightings of the Japanese. They are as short as Malays, facially indistinguishable from the Chinese, and their armor brings to mind Major Cutlip’s remarks about medieval jousters.

  The guns fire through the ports, the noise ricocheting off the steep shores …

  … and the acrid smoke blows over the crew, disinterring memories of battle.

  “By the mark nine,” calls the leadsman, “and a half nine …”

  “Two boats embarking,” reports the watch in the trestle tree.

  Through his telescope, Penhaligon finds blurry images of the two sampans.

  “Mr. Cutlip, I want the marines to row the longboat, dressed in landsmen’s slops, with cutlasses hidden below the thwarts in sackcloth.” The major salutes and goes below. The captain proceeds to the waist to address the coxswain, a cunning Scillies smuggler pressed from the shadow of the Penzance gallows. “Mr. Flowers, lower the longboat but tangle the ropes, so as to buy time. I want the greeting party to meet our longboat closer to the Phoebus than to shore.”

  “A proper Frenchman’s fanny I’ll make of it, Captain.”

  Walking back to the bow, Hovell asks permission to air a thought.

  “My esteem for your aired thoughts is high, Mr. Hovell.”

  “Thank you, sir. I posit that the governor-general’s and the admiralty’s twin orders regarding the present mission—to paraphrase, ‘Plunder the Dutch and seduce the Japanese’—do not correspond with the scenario we find here. If the Dutch have nothing to plunder and the Japanese prove loyal to their allies, how are we to carry out our orders? A third strategy, however, may yield a more fruitful result.”

  “Describe what you have in mind, Lieutenant.”

  “That the Dutch incumbents of Dejima be viewed not as a barrier to an Anglo-Japanese treaty but, rather, as its key. How? In short, sir, instead of smashing the Dutch engine of trade in Nagasaki, we help them repair it and then requisition it.”

  “By the mark ten,” calls out the leadsman, “ten and a third …”

  “The lieutenant”—Wren heard everything—“has not forgotten that we and the Dutch are at war? Why would they cooperate with their national enemy? If you’re still placing your hopes in that scrap of paper from the Dutch King Billy at Kew—”

  “Might the second lieutenant be good enough to let the first lieutenant speak, Mr. Wren?”

  Wren performs an ironic bow of apology, and Penhaligon wants to kick him …

  … but for your father-in-law admiral and the damage it would cause my gout.

  “The Netherlanders’ sliver of a republic,” continues Hovell, “didn’t defy the might of Bourbon Spain without a genius for pragmatism. Ten percent of profits—let us call it the ‘brokerage fee’—is a sight better than a hundred percent of nothing. Less than nothing: if no ship arrived from Java this year, then they are ignorant of the Dutch East Indies Company’s bankruptcy …”

  “… and the loss,” realizes the captain, “of their accumulated wages and private trade channeled through the company’s books. Poor Jan, Piet, and Klaas are paupers, stranded among heathens.”

  “With no means,”
adds Hovell, “of seeing home again.”

  The captain gazes at the city. “Once we have the Dutch officers aboard, we can reveal their orphaned status and present ourselves not as aggressors but godfathers. We can send one ashore both to convert his countrymen and to act as an emissary to the Japanese authorities, explaining that future ‘Dutch sailings’ shall come from Prince of Wales Island in Penang rather than Batavia.”

  “To seize the Dutch copper as prize would kill the golden goose of trade. But to trade the silks and sugar in our hold and leave with half as a legal cargo would allow us to return each year—to the ongoing enrichment of company and empire.”

  How Hovell reminds me, Penhaligon thinks, of my youthful self.

  “The men,” Wren says, “would cry havoc at losing their prize money.”

  “The Phoebus,” says the captain, “is His Majesty’s frigate, not their privateer.” He returns to the coxswain, the pain in his foot now difficult to conceal. “Mr. Flowers, pray untangle your French fanny. Mr. Malouf, ask Major Cutlip to start loading his marines. Lieutenant Hovell, we rely on your skill in the Dutch language to charm a pair of plump Dutch herrings into the longboat without catching a native fish.”

  THE PHOEBUS’S ANCHOR is lowered five hundred yards past the guard posts; the longboat, rowed by marines in sailors’ slops, makes leisurely progress toward the greeting party. Coxswain Flowers has the tiller, and Hovell and Cutlip sit at the prow.

  “This Nagasaki,” notes Wren, “is an anchorage the equal of Port Mahon …”

  In clear water, a shoal of silver fish changes direction.

  “… a few modern placements would make it impregnable.”

  Long, curved rice paddies stripe the low and laddered mountains.

  “Wasted on a backward race,” laments Wren, “too idle to build a navy.”

  Black smoke rises from the hunchbacked headland. Penhaligon tries to ask Daniel Snitker if the smoke could be a signal, but Snitker fails to make his answer comprehensible so the captain sends for Smeyers, a carpenter’s mate who speaks Dutch.

  The forests of pines might yield masts and spars.

  “The bay presents a lovely prospect,” ventures Lieutenant Talbot.

  The womanly adjective irritates Penhaligon, and he wonders at the wisdom of Talbot’s appointment, necessitated by the death of Sam Smythe at Penang. Then he recalls the loneliness of his own third lieutenancy, caught between the resentment of a frosty captain’s cabin and his former comrades in the midshipmen’s cockpit. “A fair sight, yes, Mr. Talbot.”

  A man in the heads, a few feet down and a few feet forward, groans.

  “The Japanese, I read,” says Talbot, “give florid names to their kingdom …”

  The unseen sailor issues an almighty orgasmic bellow of relief …

  “‘The Land of a Thousand Autumns’ or ‘The Root of the Sun.’”

  … and a turd hits the water like a cannonball. Wetz rings three bells.

  “Seeing Japan,” says Talbot, “such poetic names seem precise.”

  “What I see,” says Wren, “is a sheltered harbor for an entire squadron.”

  Never mind a squadron, the captain thinks. What about a fleet?

  His heart quickens as the vision grows. A British Pacific fleet.

  The captain imagines a floating city of British men-of-war and frigates …

  Penhaligon pictures his chart of Northeast Asia, with a British base in Japan …

  China herself, he dares to think, could follow India into our sphere …

  Midshipman Malouf returns with Smeyers.

  … and the Philippines, too, would be ours for the taking.

  “Mr. Smeyers, be so good as to ask Mr. Snitker about that smoke—”

  The toothless Amsterdammer squints at the smoke from the galley stove.

  “—that black smoke, there, above that hunchbacked headland.”

  “Aye, sir.” Smeyers points as he translates. Snitker is unworried.

  “No bad, he says,” translates Smeyers. “Farmers burn fields every autumn.”

  Penhaligon nods. “Thank you. Stay nearby, in case I need you.”

  He notices that the flag—the Dutch tricolor—is tangled around the jibboom.

  He looks for someone to right it and sees a half-caste boy with a wiry pigtail picking oakum under the steam grating. “Hartlepool!”

  The youth puts down his rope and comes over. “Yessir.”

  Hartlepool’s face speaks of fatherlessness and resilience.

  “Pray disentangle that flag for me, Hartlepool.”

  “Sir.” The barefoot boy slips over the main rail, balances on the bowsprit …

  How many years, wonders Penhaligon, since I was so nimble?

  … and darts up the timber angled at nearly forty-five degrees.

  The bereaved captain’s thumb finds Tristram’s crucifix.

  At the spritsail yard, forty yards out and thirty yards up, Hartlepool stops. Gripping the boom between his thighs, he untangles the flag.

  “Can he swim, I wonder?” Lieutenant Talbot asks himself aloud.

  “I’d not know,” says Midshipman Malouf, “but one doubts it …”

  Hartlepool makes the return trip with the same lithe grace.

  “If his mother was a Blackamoor,” comments Wren, “his father was a cat.”

  When Hartlepool jumps onto the deck in front of him, the captain gives him a new farthing. “Ably done, boy.” Hartlepool’s eyes widen at the unexpected generosity. He thanks Penhaligon and returns to his oakum-picking.

  A lookout shouts: “Greeting party nearly at the longboat!”

  Through his telescope, Penhaligon sees the two sampans approaching the longboat. The foremost carries three Japanese officials, two in gray and a younger colleague in black. Three servants sit at the back. The rearmost sampan conveys the two Dutchmen. Their features lack much detail at this range, but Penhaligon can make out that one is tanned, bearded, and rotund, the other is sticklike and pale as chalk.

  Penhaligon hands the telescope to Snitker, who reports to Smeyers. “Gray-coats is officials, he says, Captain. Black-coat is translator. The big Dutchman is Melchior van Cleef, chief of Dejima. The thin one is a Prussian. His name is Fischer. Fischer is second in command.”

  Van Cleef cups his hands to his mouth and hails Hovell, a hundred yards off.

  Snitker keeps talking. Smeyers says, “Van Cleef is human rat, he says, sir, a true … a damned coat-turn? And Fischer is a sneak, a liar, a cheat whoreson, he says, sir, with big ambition. I don’t think Mr. Snitker like them, sir.”

  “But both men,” opines Wren, “sound amenable to our proposal. The last thing we need are incorruptible men-of-principle types.”

  Penhaligon takes his telescope from Snitker. “Not many of them hereabouts.”

  Cutlip’s marines stop rowing. The longboat glides to a dead stop.

  The boat of the three Japanese officials touches the longboat’s prow.

  “Don’t let them board,” murmurs Penhaligon to his first lieutenant.

  The prows of the two boats nudge each other. Hovell salutes.

  The inspectors bow. Via the interpreter, introductions are made.

  One inspector and the interpreter now half-stand, as if preparing to transfer.

  Delay them, Penhaligon urges Hovell silently, delay them …

  Hovell feigns a coughing fit; he presents one hand in apology.

  The second sampan arrives, pulling up to the longboat’s port side.

  “A disadvantageous position,” mutters Wren, “wedged in from both sides.”

  Hovell recovers from his cough; he doffs his hat at Van Cleef.

  Van Cleef stands and leans over the prow to take Hovell’s hand.

  The spurned inspector and interpreter, meanwhile, half sit down.

  Deputy Fischer now stands, clumsily, and the boat rocks.

  Hovell swings the large Van Cleef over onto the longboat.

  “One in the bag, Mr. Hovell,” mutters
the captain. “Deftly done.”

  Faintly comes the rumble of Chief van Cleef’s thunderous laughter.

  Fischer takes a step toward the longboat, wobbly as a foal …

  … but to Penhaligon’s dismay, the interpreter now grips the long boat’s lip.

  The nearest marine calls to Major Cutlip. Cutlip grapples his way over …

  “Not yet,” mumbles the captain, impotently, “don’t let him aboard.”

  Lieutenant Hovell, meanwhile, is beckoning the deputy over.

  Cutlip grips the hand of the unwanted interpreter …

  Wait wait, the captain wants to yell, wait for our second Dutchman!

  … and Cutlip lets the interpreter go, waving his hand as if it is brutally mangled.

  Now, at long last, Hovell has hold of the unsteady deputy’s hand.

  Penhaligon mumbles, “Land the man, Hovell, for Christ’s sake!”

  The interpreter decides not to wait for further assistance and plants one foot on the longboat’s port bulwark just as Hovell swings the Prussian deputy over the starboard …

  … and half of the marines take up their cutlasses, some flashing in sunlight.

  The other marines take up their oars and push the sampans away.

  The black-coated interpreter flops, like a Pierrot, into the water. The Phoebus’s longboat lunges back toward the ship.

  Chief van Cleef, realizing that he is being abducted, attacks Lieutenant Hovell.

  Cutlip intercepts and falls on him. The boat rocks dangerously.

  Let it not capsize, dear God, prays Penhaligon, not now …

  Van Cleef is subdued and the longboat settles. The Prussian is sitting meekly.

  Back at the sampans, already three lengths away, the first Japanese to act is an oarsman, who leaps into the water to save the interpreter. The gray-coated inspectors sit and stare in shock at the foreigners’ longboat, as it retreats to the Phoebus.

  Penhaligon lowers his telescope. “The first engagement is won. Strike that Dutch rag, Mr. Wren, and fly the Union Jack, topmast and prow.”

  “Yes, sir, with the greatest of pleasure.”

  “Mr. Talbot, have your landsmen rinse the filth from my decks.”

  THE DUTCHMAN VAN CLEEF seizes the rope ladder and clambers up it with an agility belying his bulk. Penhaligon glances up at the quarterdeck, where Snitker remains out of sight, for now, under his floppy-brimmed hat. Batting away proffered hands, Van Cleef leaps onto the Phoebus like a Moorish boarder, glares along the line of officers, singles out Penhaligon, points a finger so wrathfully that a pair of marines take a step closer in case of attack, and declares, through his curly, close-cropped beard and tea-brown teeth, “Kapitein!”