The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (242 page)

Jack noticed that, as Moseh was saying this, he was fingering the scrap of Indian bead-work he had inherited from his Manhattoe ancestors. It was something that Moseh did, in an absent-minded way, whenever he was afraid of getting a raw deal. Jack decided not to mention it.

After two weeks of working their way down the coast of California
they had crossed the Tropic of Cancer and weathered the bald promontory of Cabo San Lucas on New Year’s Day of 1701. Then they had set their course due southeast so as to traverse the mouth of the Gulf of California, a journey that had ended up taking several days because the Virazon, or northwest wind down the coast, had failed. Eventually they had come in sight of the trio of islands called the Three Marys, which lay off the bony elbow of New Spain, Cabo Corrientes—the Cape of Currents. Two rather tense days had followed. Those two Capes (San Lucas and Corrientes) formed the gate-posts of the long narrow body of water that ran between lower California and New Spain, which was called a Strait by those who still believed California was an island and a Gulf by those who didn’t. Whether it was a Strait or a Gulf, the Three Marys had a commanding position near its entrance. Yet they were far enough north to be out of reach of the Spanish authorities in Acapulco. Consequently they were a popular place for English and French pirates to spend winters. And to this human danger were added certain natural ones: the Three Marias were nearly joined to Cabo Corrientes by vast shallows. Even if they’d been able to salvage the latest Spanish charts from the Manila Galleon—which they hadn’t—these would have been nearly useless, because the powerful currents passing between the two Capes in and out of the Strait or Gulf shifted the sands from one tide to the next. The only persons in the world who would have the cunning to pilot a ship in that area would be the aforementioned pirates—if there were any. If there were, and they were English, they might or might not be the natural allies of
Minerva
. If French they would certainly be enemies.

But a nerve-wracking circuit of Maria Madre, Maria Magdalena, and Maria Cleofas had not turned up anything beyond a few decaying bivouacs, some abandoned and some manned by skeleton crews of dumbfounded wretches who fired guns in the air in weak bids to beckon them closer. “This year’s crop of pirates—if any made it around Cape Horn—must be wintering in the Galápagos,” van Hoek had said one night at mess, as they supped on the meat of some tortoises that had been captured from the longboat.

“The only pirates are
we,
” Dappa had remarked. This had not sat very well with van Hoek, but it had made something of an impression on Elizabeth de Obregon and Edmund de Ath. They had excused themselves early, withdrawn to the taffrail, and had yet another in their seemingly un-ending series of obscure conferences. “They’ll be re-writing their damned letters all night long,” Jack had predicted.

More conferences, and more re-writing, had followed the next
day, as they’d dropped anchor off Maria Madre (the largest of the islands) and used the longboat to ferry Heavy Objects back and forth between
Minerva
and shore. Elizabeth and Edmund were confined to their cabins the whole time, and the longboat’s load was covered with sailcloth whenever it was within view of their windows. The cargo hold was off limits to them. There was no way for them to know what had been done. The obvious interpretation was that part of the quicksilver had been taken ashore and buried, and stones brought out from the island to ballast the ship. But it might just as well have been a mountebank’s shell-game: quicksilver-flasks going in to shore and then coming right back out again to be put back in their places in the hold.

The same performance had been repeated two days later on the Cape of Currents itself. Only then had van Hoek given the order they’d all been waiting for: to put that Cape behind them and run before the Virazon, coasting southeast into the country of New Galicia, the northernmost part of the coast that was really settled. The mountains and volcanoes of that country looked empty and barren, but after the sun went down they saw a signal-fire blazing on a high remote summit and knew from this that they had been sighted by the sentinel who was posted there. It meant that a rider was now galloping post-haste towards the City of Mexico, a journey of five hundred miles across terrible mountains, to deliver the news that a great ship had come out of the West. According to Elizabeth de Obregon, the people of Mexico (who were almost all monks and nuns, as the Church owned all of the land in the city) would begin to pray around the clock as soon as they heard that news, and would not stop until letters arrived from other watchers, farther down the coast, confirming that it was indeed the Manila Galleon.

Of course in this case it
wasn’t,
and so the letters would say something else. As the only two survivors of the disaster, Elizabeth and Edmund would perforce be the authors of those letters. Van Hoek would make a report, too, as a courtesy to the Viceroy. Much hinged upon how exactly those letters were worded, and on how
Minerva
’s involvement was explained. The two survivors had spent much of the journey from the Golden Gate to Cabo San Lucas writing and re-writing them, and had continued to make revisions until a few minutes before the documents had been placed on the longboat and despatched toward the shore.
Minerva
had cruised past the port of Chiamela, which was large and well-sheltered by islands but too shallow for large ships, and continued a few hours down the coast to the deep-water port of Navidad. By then it must have been obvious to the Alcalde of Chiamela, who was pursuing them on horseback the
whole way, that this was no Manila Galleon, and that something had gone wrong. But not until
Minerva’s
longboat pulled to within shouting distance of Navidad did anyone who’d not been on the voyage learn of what had happened in the middle of the Pacific. There was a suitable eruption of wailing, cursing, praying, and (eventually) bell-clanging when this bit of intelligence finally sparked across the gap. Moseh winced empathetically and turned his attentions back to Jack.

“Though they were our captives in all but name, Ed and Elsie” (here he used Jack’s names for the two passengers) “might have said to us: ‘You men of
Minerva
are starving, your ship needs repairs, your cargo is valueless save at the mine-heads of New Spain and Peru. Only at the great ports of the King of Spain, such as Acapulco, Panama, and Lima, have you any hope of trading your quicksilver for what you so desperately need. If you are barred from those ports, you shall be exiled to a few wretched pirate-islands, for in your current plight you’ve scant hope of weathering Cape Horn. A few words on parchment, signed and sealed by us, determine whether you’ll be welcomed as heroes or hunted down as scurvy pirates.’ ”

“They
might
have said that,” Jack agreed. “But they didn’t.”

“They didn’t. If they had, it would have meant we were negotiating, which was best avoided. So before the subject was even broached I went into my Cabbalist act and gave Ed and Elsie to believe that I was naught more than an errand-boy for a legion of wizards and alchemists in the Islands of Solomon. That, and the caches of quicksilver that we might or might not have buried on Maria Madre and Cabo Corrientes, put us in a stronger position than we really deserve.”

“Dappa has read their letters,” Jack remarked. “He admits that their Latin is high-flown and abstruse, and that he may be overlooking much that is nuanced. But he seems to think that the survivors’ accounts depict us in a favorable light.”

“At the very least we should avoid summary execution,” Moseh allowed.

“There you go again—always the optimist.”

The port of Navidad despatched a boat of its own to bring out some provisions. The only cure for scurvy was to go ashore, but since they had arrived at the Golden Gate and begun to eat the fruits of the earth again, teeth had stopped falling out and gums had pinkened. Whatever was on this boat should tide them over to Acapulco. As it turned out, the boat carried not just food, but also tidings from Madrid: King Carlos II, “The Sufferer,” had finally died.

Of course hardly anyone on
Minerva
cared, and in any case it was not much of a surprise, as all of Christendom had been waiting for it to happen for three decades. But as they were in the Spanish Empire now, they tried to look solemn. Edmund de Ath crossed himself. Elizabeth de Obregon covered her face and went into her cabin without saying a word. Jack naïvely supposed she was praying the rosary for her dead monarch. But when he next went to his own cabin for a cat-nap he could hear the
scribble, scribble
of her quill, inscribing yet more letters.

They sailed for another week along a coast lined with cacao and vanilla plantations, and on the 28th of January came in sight of the first city they’d seen since leaving Manila in July. It was a shoal of mean little shacks that looked in danger of being shrugged into the water by the green mountains rising up behind. They could have sailed right past it, mistaking it for a wretched fishing-village, if not for the fact that a large castle stood in the middle.

The steepness of those mountains suggested a deep-water harbor. This was confirmed by a few large ships that had come in so close to shore that they were tied up to trees! But the passage in to that harbor was winding; the
barque de négoce
that came out to meet them had to put her three lateen sails through any number of difficult evolutions just to get out into blue water. This barque sported two six-pounders on either side of her high stern as well as a dozen or so swivel-guns distributed around her gunwales. In other words, compared to a Dutch East Indiaman like
Minerva
she was essentially unarmed. But the gaudy encrustations wrapped around her stern, and the fabulously complex heraldry on her ensign, told them that this barque had been sent out by someone important: according to Elizabeth de Obregon, the castellan, who was the highest authority in Acapulco. The two survivors of the Galleon were welcomed aboard this barque.
Minerva
was told not to enter the harbor, but to proceed several miles down the coast to a place called Port Marques.

Van Hoek had heard of it; Port Marques was the semi-official smugglers’ port, frequented by ships that came up from Peru with pigs of silver and other contraband that it would be unseemly to unload directly beneath the windows of the Castle of Acapulco. So they passed Acapulco by, with no sense of regret, as every building there was either a mud hovel or a monastery, and a few hours later dropped anchor before Port Marques. This was even more ragged and humble, being little more than a camp inhabited by Vagabonds, blacks, mulattoes, and mestizos.

Moseh went ashore on the first boat-load, fell on his face in the sand, and kissed it. “I will never set foot on a ship again as God is my
witness!” he hollered.

“If you are talking to God, why are you speaking Sabir?” shouted Jack, who was watching from the poop deck of
Minerva
.

“God is far away,” Moseh explained, “and I must rely on men to keep me honest.”

L
ATER
D
APPA WENT ASHORE
and talked to some of the black men camped on the beach. There was a group of half a dozen who had come from the same African river as he, and spoke a similar language. Each of them had been captured by other Africans and sold down the river to Bonny, where he had been branded with the trademark of the Royal Africa Company and eventually loaded on an English ship that had taken him to Jamaica.

Each of them had come, in other words, from a part of Africa notorious for breeding lazy and rebellious slaves, and each had acquired some additional defect en route: infected eyes, gray hair, excessive gauntness, mysterous swellings, or contagious-looking skin diseases. Therefore none of the planters had wanted to buy them, or even take them for free. Obviously the captain of the slave-ship had no intention of taking such refuse slaves back to Africa and so they were simply abandoned on the dock of Kingston, where it was hoped and expected they’d die. And indeed there was no better place for it, as Kingston was perhaps the filthiest city on the planet. Most of the refuse slaves obligingly died. But each of the ones in this little band had separately made his way inland, and entered into a sort of Vagabond life, joining together in bands with escaped slaves and native Jamaicans and roving about the island stealing chickens and trying to stay one step ahead of the posses sent out after them by plantation-owners.

This particular group had drifted to an unsettled stretch of coast towards the western tip of Jamaica, where fishing was rumored to be good. About a year later they had encountered a brig full of English adventurers sailing out of the west, i.e., from the general direction of New Spain. These Englishmen—who, to judge from their description, were likely nothing more than incompetent or luckless boca-neers—had lately been reckless enough to find a route through a barrier reef that had hitherto barred access to a certain part of the Mosquito Coast, seven hundred miles due west of Jamaica. Now they were making a foray to Kingston to collect gun-powder, musket-balls, swine, and other necessaries, so that they could go back and establish a settlement.

Here the narrator—an African by the name of Amboe, with a bald head and grizzled beard—jumped over what must have been a
somewhat involved negotiation, and said simply that he and a dozen of his band had decided to leave Jamaica and throw in their lot with these boca-neers, and had helped establish a rudimentary village at a place called Haulover Creek near the mouth of the river Belice. But it was a pestilential place, and the Englishmen got drunker and nastier every day, and so those who’d survived the initial rounds of diseases and hurricanes had pulled up stakes and moved inland, passing through a land of jungle-covered Pyramids (lengthy, implausible yarns deleted here), and straying across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (or so Jack—who’d been studying maps—inferred), to the Pacific Coast, and then wandering up this way.