Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (289 page)

“Ah!” the old woman grizzled softly; “I must have a Knipperdolling mistress!” And she crossed herself in the shadow.

There were, below the inner wall of the well, so low down that Edward Colman must bend to reach them, a number of hooks, out of sight, in the cavity. On each hook there hung a ring, and from each ring there depended downwards a chain, painted, so that it might not rust. These rings Edward Colman took one by one and set them on the bucket-hook, that still hung from a rope over a wheel in the roof of the well-chamber. They laid hold of the rope-end and silently and methodically pulled together. Each time there came up at last a wet, green-slimed, chain-bound, and heavy little case of wood.

And whilst he pulled, in between the rattling of the chain on the wheel and the hollow, continual dripping sound of the water, he directed her as to what she was to do. She might, he said, if she would, argue with her new mistress upon points of doctrine — Magdalena was no very hot Knipperdolling; but betwixt her pulling one way and the old woman’s pulling the other, Magdalena, or both of them, might very well come to be of the Church of England, which, as seemed likely, would remain the Church of that realm for many years. But she was to leave Magdalena to do what polishing and cleansing her heart yearned after in the house; the rushes off the floor should go, and sand take its place; the sconces of iron might be replaced by sconces of brass; what Magdalena would have, that she should have. And the old woman was to instruct Magdalena in the details of what small trade should, in his absence, come to his house; she was, he said, of a swift and steady capacity to learn. He had tried her.

“I will,” he said, “that if it prove that you die ere I come back, this my house — if God grant me an heir — shall have at its head this wife of mine instructed in my ways and able to instruct mine heir. And I know of no woman that better can do it than you. I will enjoin upon her in a letter I shall write her before I go that in those things she shall be subject to you for instruction.”

She said, “Ah! ah!” but in a tone of mollification and consolement.

At last they had fourteen wet boxes on the floor beside them; the old man panted very much and Edward Colman. de when he turned back into the long room and went to the two old men.

“Sirs,” he said, “have you written me those bills?”

Each of them looked at the other to speak, till he put in, with a great laugh —

“Why, I had forgotten,” he said, “ye can neither of ye write!” and he called into the shadows, “Nurse Janet, come ye and write two bills of a thousand pound upon such merchants of Amsterdam as their worships shall advise you of.” And whilst, with her lips working over a difficult - writing that, nevertheless, she had by heart, having been schooled thereto by Edward Colman’s father, Edward himself went back and forth between the dark corner and the lit table, bearing each time a heavy box, wet with salt water and green with slime. He had himself to take a breathing space at the fourteenth journey, and after that he spoke.

“Sirs,” he said, “are ye well minded to set your marks, esteemed and known in Amsterdam, to these bills of a thousand pounds?”

Solomon Keymer answered, “Aye!” and nudged Jeal till he, too, answered, “Aye!”

“Then,” said Edward Colman, with the green slime of his boxes on his hands, his arms, and his thighs, “I take back much of what I have said against this ancient town. For, for sure, much of good it must have in it if it breed old men that so love its customs. For old age breeds avarice, and in few places will you find old men to do this much.”

“Why,” Solomon Keymer said, “the Corporation of the Five Ports is an ancient and honourable estate.”

“I have heard that said afore now,” Edward Colman answered him; “yet bethink you of the motto of this port of ours. I do think you know how it runs: ‘God save England and the town of Rye’ ? Well, then, hear me speak this: in fourteen boxes repose the sum of seven thousand pounds in gold coins. And I do take it that in your breasts repose two hearts of honour, that are more precious than ten thousand weight each of gold. This gold I had of my ancestors in better times; your, goodly hearts you had of the same origin. These seven thousand pounds I deliver into your hands. Two of the thousand shall be yours against the bills ye have given me.” Solomon Keymer scratched his head and the Mayor held his beard at these words. “The other five thousands you shall safeguard for me, dispensing of them such coins as my young wife shall need till I come back, accounting for them to me then, or to her and her heirs if that I do die. Sirs, you have been my neighbours and the neighbours of my father, and your fathers of my fathers, through countless years withouten tale or number. Such deeds of trust as this of mine were done in the old days by our fathers, and because of such unity and trust our town grew great. Now it is a little town amongst the cities, but because I believe in the honorability in the hearts of you, I shall get me forth from this shelter with a better courage. For, for sure, ye be barons at heart, and the corporation of the Five Ports is an ancient and honourable estate still. And whilst there remain here old men, as I am sure, of approved honour, and young men of, as I do hope, courage and adventure, there shall not yet be need to call out in despair, ‘God save England and the town of Rye.’”

He spoke this long speech well and without halting, because he had been well trained in Latin, and reading, and rhetoric at the Grammar School of King Edward, and had been many times chosen to speak for the town upon great occasions. But the two old men came of King Henry’s time, and were slow witted, so that they hardly understood more than the drift of his context. Old Jeal, indeed, had some tears in his eyes, because of a shame that he felt; but Solomon Keymer had it still in him to say —

“I perceive that you have jested till now, Edward Colman, and if I little like your jesting I will, for the sake of your sensible speech, make you a good wish, and the oath of a Baron of the Five Ports, to observe your trust as you were my son and your wife my good daughter. For the Corporation of the Cinque Ports is an ancient and honourable estate.”

When he had nearly got them from the room, Edward Colman had yet to suffer a measure of apologies and condolences from the Mayor.

“I am to blame,” he wept. “I — I — because I have begotten the daughter that has made this bother.”

“Oh aye,” Edward Colman answered; “but you will have to pay for it when your daughter learns I am come off with the Dutch ship. And for your daughter, it is not for begetting her that you are to blame; it is for having beaten her so little.”

“Aye; but,” the Mayor said, “these be newer times. Beatings be out of fashion for maidens.”

“Sir,” Edward Colman answered him, “here is a great medley of new and old. Let us keep what is good and salutary of the old. The great Queen Eliza was well beaten, as we have read, so she grew to be a virtuous and a virgin queen — the greatest that ever was. Because you had not the stern heart of the older days you did not beat your daughter; therefore she is a shrew, and hath betrayed us all. For me, I was long since minded to see other lands and learn of other ports how this of ours may be amended. Therefore, if I go now — since I am wedded to my wife — I have little to clamour at; and though somewhat you have injured me, yet I pardon it very willingly, and pray God to keep and save you.”

He spoke a little negligently, pushing the old man towards the dark opening of the stairway.

“Why, you are my godfather,” he added more earnestly. “I have much to do and but an hour to do it in. Pray you give your blessing before you go — to me, and this house, and my new enterprise.”

The old woman, with her head on the table, beside the candle, in the dim room, whimpered, “Ah! ah!”

PART II. GOING ABROAD
.

CHAPTER I
.

“SIRS,” Henry Hudson said, “the Ancients have spoken of setting up monuments of brass, or monuments of good verses. But we do set now-a-days our names upon the hills that are more lasting than brass, and upon broad rivers that shall flow when all libraries be burned.”

He was a man of a great girth, heavy upon his feet, with a square and curly beard of an iron grey and deep-set eyes of a shining black. He had in his air something of the overbearing, something of the masterly, something of the gasconading and something of the heavy and the trustworthy. He was rather a man of the last age — of Henry’s or Elizabeth’s day — than of that year of a new century when men were less lusty than he, when men were more prone to question, more prone to sneer and apt to grin in cabals behind a leader’s back, to form cabals, mutinies and obstinate knots and to question the divine right of pastors and kings.

But there, in the room of the Golden Horn, which was next door to the hall of the Dutch East India Company at Amsterdam, he was very much a king and very much unquestioned.

He had sixteen listeners standing in a half-ring before him, and one, M. de Brinic, agent from

Henry IV of France, that sat astride a little three-legged chair and looked up at him. His wife, a plain, square, fat Bristol woman with but one eye, sat a little behind him, beside the great stove, and knitted for him a cap of grey wool that in time would cover his whole head, forehead and chin, as the chain helmets of the old knights had done. She had come all the way from Bristol to prepare his clothes against this sailing away in quest of the North-West Passage that, in fourteen days from then, he was to attempt.

It was to M. de Brinic that the heavy man mostly addressed himself, though he had always an eye for the faces of the ring that stood before him — a ring of elderly Dutchmen in straight black coats and with worn features, of a few Frenchmen that were secretaries seeking to be taken as adventurers upon his voyage.

“Sir,” he said, and this time he addressed himself to Brinic, “former Ages have been called Ages of Gold, of Brass, of Iron; or Ages of Horace, of Tully, of Aristotle, as the bookmen will tell you. But I think that future ages shall speak of this as the Age of Pilots. For, for sure, the great men that be masters of my craft and mystery shall have great honours shown to them that for princes, kings and commonwealths, discover realms, islands, empires, continents, harbours, passages, anchorages or straits, and do give to the Alexanders of this day new regions to conquer or to the republics that at present exist, the lands upon which to set up colonies and commonwealths.”

The French agent slapped his knee with his embroidered glove and, with a beck of his head, summoned a secretary to translate into his ear the words that Hudson had spoken. He nodded when he heard, moved his knees inward upon the stool, set his chin upon the top of the stool-back, and then —

“Pilot,” he said, “you cannot say that we, that we—” He spoke a very hesitating English, and Hudson kept upon him his dark, masterly eyes in which there danced little beads of light. “In short,” the Frenchman said, “we have demonstrated that we highly honour you. For has not my master — the King, that is more valiant than any man, Henry of Navarre and France — has not he offered — offered—”

“Monsieur,” Hudson said, “your great and Protestant sovereign has offered me twice what the Hollanders will pay me, and four ships and larger for the Netherlands one and a little one. But he comes late; and, see you, it is better merchanting, and better honouring, to be first in the market with a little price than second with a great one.” The Frenchman stood upon his legs, with the back of the stool between them.

“It is bad selling to take the first offer!” he said.

“Why,” Hudson said, “I am a better navigator than a seller of my services. That is true!”

The Frenchman took his little hat from his head; he had a vexed face, for he had urged his King to secure this voyage of Hudson’s — he had urged his King long before to employ this great navigator and pilot, and the King had never given his commission till that day morning when it was too late, and Hudson was many weeks engaged to seek out the North-West Passage in the interests of the Dutch.

“Monsieur,” Hudson said, and he removed his huge hat with a more negligent formality, “so you will, I will engage myself under bond and seal, if I have not before then discovered the’ traverse and passage north-westerly to the Indies — if I have not before then discovered this passage for these Hollanders, I will make a voyage for your King. But for this year, whilst the weather holds, and the hearts of my men and the victuals of my ship, I must honestly and with all endeavours make the essay for my new masters.”

The French agent bit his glove.

“I will bethink me upon it,” he said.

“Monsieur,” Hudson answered, “I rede and advise you to come to your determination swiftly. For here in Amsterdam I have to visit my agents from the city of Genoa that lost Christopher to the Spaniards, and from the Portugais, that lost Cabot to the English; each of them would employ me next year to make for them a voyage of discovery.”

“Sir,” the French agent said, “I will bethink me upon it, and you shall have my answer this night.”

“Monsieur, I salute you,” Hudson answered.

And setting on his hat again, and again lifting it, the Frenchman pushed his way through the listeners and was followed by his little quota of secretaries and writers. Hudson set his broad back closer in to the white porcelain of the high stove, and gazed jovially and heavily before him.

Henry Hudson was a man then turned of forty; and, if he never put it into words, it was certainly true when he hinted that he was the most celebrated navigator that then lived. He was one of those West of England men who had come to the fore as sailors when the trend of wars rather against Spain than France, the trend of trade rather towards the West than the East, and above all the pitiless drift of the tides in the channel that swept shingle into all the Eastern harbours and closed them to shipping, had rendered the south-east of England no longer the maritime centre of the world. In his day the Alards, the Fiennes, the Colmans and all the great names of the fighting shipmen, from William of Normandy’s day to Henry VII’s, had been almost forgotten; The sailors of Fowey had beaten the sailors of the Cinque Ports in Rye Bay — and when you spoke of sailors you meant men of Fowey, of Somerset, Bristol men and Plymouth lads. But Hudson had never set himself to be either fighting sailor or sailing merchantman. Very early in his life he had taken to heart the honours and the profits of the Cabots, those Portuguese-born navigators of Bristol. He had a favourite speech that he uttered very often —

“Consider you the Cabots how they sailed East and West and gained great honour; for in fourteen hundred and ninety-seven Cabot the elder sailed to forty degrees south of the line, and to sixty-seven to northwards. King Henry VIII knighted him and made him Grand Pilot of England. Edward VI gave him a pension of
£
166 13s. 4
d.
by the year. Here are great honours and profits. Consider also the glory of Sir H. Willoughby who was frozen to death, of Martin Frobisher that was knighted for his search of the Passage; of Sir H. Gilbert that hath had much honour.”

It was these men that formed the names of his talk always; Sir Francis Drake, who sailed round the world first of all Englishmen, he honoured less, because he did that voyage for profit of taking ships laden with gold. He was for navigators only, and he debated much and often as to who it was that first found the New World in ancient days — whether King Arthur, or Maljo, or Brandon, or that Prince Madock the Welshman, whom Orsin Quineth in his chronicle upholdeth as having sailed away for ever with men from Wales into the West. And there were Danes and Frisians who said that the first to see the western lands was a Danish pirate — and the Spaniards said it was Hanno, a Carthaginian Prince, that lived in times of the old Romans. Save that he hated the Spaniards he was inclined to give the palm to Hanno the Carthaginian — but always his talk was of navigators, not of merchants or ship-soldiers. He thought so much of this, that although it was the Hollander West India Company that had asked him to come to Amsterdam to lead their fleet for them, it was to the Hollander East Indiamen he engaged himself for that year.

He had debated the matter with his fat wife, that had come with him to knit him garments and to guide him with advice.

“Nay, dame,” he said, when not very eagerly she bade him consider that the West Indiamen offered him two hundred and seventy pounds, where the East Indiamen offered him but two hundred and fifty by the year; “the East Indiamen pay me to guide them to the East Indies by the North-West Passage; the West Indiamen offer me more to guide them to Spanish ports in the Gulf, where they may sack towns and take galleons. But I am no general to guide soldiers and freebooters; I am a navigator to discover passages.”

And his wife was not very earnest to over persuade him, for she was not set to make him push himself in where there was fighting — he had already the knack of finding trouble, since, being overbearing, he had always a mutiny or two of his men to tell of when he came back to her at his voyage ends. And at that time, though with the truce between Spain and the United Provinces of the Netherlands, it soon after changed its character, the Dutch West India Company was no association of peaceful merchants; it was made up wholly and purely of privateers, who preyed upon the Spanish galleons in the Gulf of Mexico. When Hudson had gone to their hall to treat with them of his engagement, he had seen, between the wooden pillars and beneath the models of ships that hung from the arch-keys, whole piles of silver candlesticks, of golden vessels, of ingots and bars of precious metals and whole heaps and mounds of altar cloths and stoles and chasubles — the most costly, jewelled and gold-sewn textiles — roughly sorted and thrown down together ready for selling. And when he had asked what these were and had been told by the interpreter — for he had no Dutch — that these were the produce of their ships just come from the Western Main, he had sniffed and said —

“What islands exhibit trees that bear such fruits? I know of none.” And when he was told by the Dutchmen there assembled that he was wanted to guide them not to any solitary seas but to unknown and hidden towns of the Spaniards, he had sniffed still more and said —

“Why, then, I shall set my name to no promontories, unless I slay a Spaniard to take from it the name he had bestowed. This is the duello, not navigating.” And it was whilst he had been in this discontented mood that an emissary of the East Indiamen, a man with a melancholy face and a black cloak who, because he was a merchant and not a freebooter, spoke English and needed no interpreter like the Western men — this melancholy merchant had taken him by the sleeve and had said: If he had a mind to find the East Indies by way of the North-West Passage, maybe he might find the employment he sought, hard by in another hall in the Keizersgracht.

It was a quest much more to the navigator’s taste — for the North-West Passage was Hudson’s Philosopher’s Stone; to find it he would have guided fleets unpaid. All the great navigators of the world had sought it; some had died frozen in the ice, like Willoughby; some had been seduced by the way southwards, like Magellan, or by the love of plunder, like Sir Francis Drake; some had been contented with the finding of the New World, like Columbus or Vespucci. But the Passage remained undiscovered; a thing for the steadfast, a thing for the adventurous, a thing that all navigators had sought for and none found. Three attempts after it he had made already, always in English bottoms, as apprentice and as master-pilot, six times he had seen the New World; and it was partly out of a feeling of half-superstition that he had been willing to come to terms with these Dutchmen, since the three most prosperous discoverers had been always foreigners in foreign pay; Columbus, a Genoese in pay of the Castilians; the Cabots, Portuguese in pay of England; Vespucci, an Italian in pay of Spain, or Giovanni Venazano for France.

Why, then, should not the last and greatest secret fall to him, an Englishman in pay of the Hollanders? In that mood he had come to Amsterdam, and it was whilst he was in that mood that he had heard with disgust of the West Indian filibustering. He could have had a dozen offers as good in London; he could have had them from France, from Genoa, from Venice itself. He could take engagements for ten years ahead to guide settlements to the American coast; each year one, or even two, from different nations. But he desired to find the North-West Passage. He was the greatest navigator then in the world; he could choose his employers.

At the hall of the East Indiamen — an older, browner hall than that of those Western men — he found older and graver men. He found maps offered to his view, instead of chasubles and ingots — maps of all Cathay and the Spice Islands of the East. These men were concerned with finding a short channel to the golden and flowering lands of merchandise; the others had been set merely upon regions of plunder. The ships in the West India Hall — the models hung between the wooden pillars in the arches — had been high turreted, lean bellied, swift, agile, of little use for cargo and tremendously over-sparred. The men there had been fighting men, fat, loud-voiced, and set to avenge upon the devils of Spain their long struggles, their harryings under Alva and Requescens and Don John of Austria. These men were worrying down Spain as dogs worry a great stag to death. That was very well; but he sought the North-West Passage. England in these days was peaceable enough to Spain; they had beaten the Armada, they had suffered nothing at any time, they had feared nothing for thirty years.