The Confusion

“But she did not say so explicitly. Until we see a letter with the arms of Hanover on it, we can’t know Sophie’s mind,” said Vrej.

“So you vote for London?” Dappa asked.

Vrej shrugged. “That would bring us directly to the Mint at the Tower of London. We could hardly improve on that. What is your vote, Dappa?”

Dappa’s eyes strayed momentarily toward his cabin. “I vote for Qwghlm.”

“Are you voting as a share-holder in this venture, or a chronicler of the slave-trade?” van Hoek asked. For as Minerva had worked her way up the long coast of Brazil, Dappa had patiently collected and written down the personal accounts of numerous African slaves, and it was no secret that he would see them in print.

“True, it’s a foregone conclusion that Eliza-who according to Jack is an ex-slave like us, and a passionate hater of that Institution-would gladly be the patroness of my book, and support its publication,” Dappa admitted. “But I have reasons besides that for preferring Qwghlm. To reach London or Amsterdam we’d have to sail up the Channel, practically under the guns of St.-Malo and Dunkerque and diverse other French privateer-havens. This were unwise even if France and England were not involved in a great war.”

“We could go north round Britain, conceivably,” Vrej muttered, “and approach through the North Sea, which ought to be a Dutch-English lake.”

“But if we are going that route anyway, we may as well go to Qwghlm.”

“I am coming about to your view,” Vrej said, after a moment.

“I don’t like it,” van Hoek said.

Qwghlm AUGUST 1702

The Seamen returned enriched with the Plunder, not of Ships, but of Fleets, Loaden with Silver; they went out Beggars, and came home Gentlemen; nay, the Wealth they brought Home, not only enrich’d themselves, but the whole Nation.

–DANIEL DEFOE,

A Plan of the English Commerce

TWO MONTHS LATER, while Minerva was lost in fog off of Outer Qwghlm, a loud noise came up from her hold, and she stopped moving.

Van Hoek drew his cutlass and went after the pilot, James Hh, and at length tracked him down at the head. He was perched on the bowsprit. “Welcome to Qwghlm,” he announced, “you are hard aground on the rock that we call the Dutch-hammer.” Then he jumped.

By this point van Hoek had been joined by several other men with pistols, and all of them rushed forward in the hope of getting a shot off at Hh. But they did not see him in that icy water (which soon would have killed him anyway); all they saw was a faint impression in the fog, like a woodcut pressed with diluted ink, of a longboat rowing away. That longboat fired a signal from its swivel-gun, and when the boom had finished echoing among the Three Sghrs, the men on Minerva could hear the distant shouting of men on other ships-a whole squadron, arrayed all around them, riding safely at anchor, well clear of the stony reef. All of these voices were speaking in French except for one or two, shouting through speaking-trumpets: “Welcome home, Jaaack!”

The men on Minerva remained perfectly still. It was not that they were trying to be stealthy-there was little point in hiding now. This was a ceremonial silence, as at a funeral. Too, there was a process of mental rearrangement taking place in the minds of the ship’s officers, as they sorted through the memories of everything that had occurred in the last few months, and began to understand it all as an elaborate deception, a trap laid by the French.

As the fog began to lift, and the outlines of French frigates started to resolve and solidify all around them. Van Hoek ambled back to the poop deck, laid his right arm out carefully on the rail, and brought his cutlass down on it, a few inches above the wrist. The blade caught in his bones and he had to worry it out and chop several more times. Finally the hand-already mangled and truncated from diverse mishaps-made a splash in the water below. Van Hoek lay down on the deck and turned white. He probably would have died if he had not been aboard a ship where treating amputations was a routine affair. This at least gave the sailors something to do while the French longboats converged on them.

At some point Dappa got a distracted look on his face, excused himself from van Hoek’s side, and began to walk briskly in the direction of Vrej Esphahnian.

Vrej drew one of several pistols from his waist-band and aimed it at Dappa. A whirring blade flew into his arm, like a steel hummingbird, and spoiled his aim. It was a hunting yo-yo and it had been flung by a Filipino crewman standing off to Vrej’s side.

Vrej dropped the weapon and flung himself overboard. He was wearing a scarlet cape that billowed up as he fell, like a sail, and formed a bubble on the water below, an island of satin that kept him afloat until a Frenchman on a longboat flung a rope to him.

“Say the word, Dad,” said Jimmy, who was manning a loaded swivel-gun, and holding a lighted torch above its touch-hole.