Shogun (2 page)

He knew they were all afraid of him, even the Captain-General, and that most hated him. But that was normal, for it was the pilot who commanded at sea; it was he who set the course and ran the ship, he who brought them from port to port.

Any voyage today was dangerous because the few navigational charts that existed were so vague as to be useless. And there was absolutely no way to fix longitude.

“Find how to fix longitude and you’re the richest man in the world,” his old teacher, Alban Caradoc, had said. “The Queen, God bless her, ’ll give you ten thousand pound and a dukedom for the answer to the riddle. The dung-eating Portuguese’ll give you more—a golden galleon. And the motherless Spaniards’ll give you twenty! Out of sight of land you’re always lost, lad.” Caradoc had paused and shaken his head sadly at him as always. “You’re lost, lad. Unless …”

“Unless you have a rutter!” Blackthorne had shouted happily, knowing that he had learned his lessons well. He was thirteen then and had already been apprenticed a year to Alban Caradoc, pilot and shipwright, who had become the father he had lost, who had never beaten him but taught him and the other boys the secrets of shipbuilding and the intimate way of the sea.

A rutter was a small book containing the detailed observation of a pilot
who had been there before
. It recorded magnetic compass courses between ports and capes, headlands and channels. It noted the sounding and depths and color of the water and the nature of the seabed. It set down the
how we got there and how we got back:
how many days on a special tack, the pattern of the wind, when it blew and from where, what currents to expect and from where; the time of storms and the time of fair winds; where to careen the ship and where to
water; where there were friends and where foes; shoals, reefs, tides, havens; at best,
everything
necessary for a safe voyage.

The English, Dutch, and French had rutters for their own waters, but the waters of the rest of the world had been sailed only by captains from Portugal and Spain, and these two countries considered all rutters secret. Rutters that revealed the seaways to the New World or unraveled the mysteries of the Pass of Magellan and the Cape of Good Hope—both Portuguese discoveries—and thence the seaways to Asia were guarded as national treasures by the Portuguese and Spanish, and sought after with equal ferocity by their Dutch and English enemies.

But a rutter was only as good as the pilot who wrote it, the scribe who hand-copied it, the very rare printer who printed it, or the scholar who translated it. A rutter could therefore contain errors. Even deliberate ones. A pilot never knew for certain
until he had been there himself
. At least once.

At sea the pilot was leader, sole guide, and final arbiter of the ship and her crew. Alone he commanded from the quarterdeck.

That’s heady wine, Blackthorne told himself. And once sipped, never to be forgotten, always to be sought, and always necessary. That’s one of the things that keep you alive when others die.

He got up and relieved himself in the scuppers. Later the sand ran out of the hourglass by the binnacle and he turned it and rang the ship’s bell.

“Can you stay awake, Hendrik?”

“Yes. Yes, I believe so.”

“I’ll send someone to replace the bow lookout. See he stands in the wind and not in the lee. That’ll keep him sharp and awake.” For a moment he wondered if he should turn the ship into the wind and heave to for the night but he decided against it, went down the companionway, and opened the fo’c’sle door. The companionway led into the crew’s quarters. The cabin ran the width of the ship and had bunks and hammock space for a hundred and twenty men. The warmth surrounded him and he was grateful for it and ignored the ever present stench from the bilges below. None of the twenty-odd men moved from his bunk.

“Get aloft, Maetsukker,” he said in Dutch, the lingua franca of the Low Countries, which he spoke perfectly, along with Portuguese and Spanish and Latin.

“I’m near death,” the small, sharp-featured man said, cringing
deeper into the bunk. “I’m sick. Look, the scurvy’s taken all my teeth. Lord Jesus help us, we’ll all perish! If it wasn’t for you we’d all be home by now, safe! I’m a merchant. I’m not a seaman. I’m not part of the crew…. Take someone else. Johann there’s—” He screamed as Blackthorne jerked him out of the bunk and hurled him against the door. Blood flecked his mouth and he was stunned. A brutal kick in his side brought him out of his stupor.

“You get your face aloft and stay there till you’re dead or we make landfall.”

The man pulled the door open and fled in agony. Blackthorne looked at the others. They stared back at him. “How are you feeling, Johann?”

“Good enough, Pilot. Perhaps I’ll live.”

Johann Vinck was forty-three, the chief gunner and bosun’s mate, the oldest man aboard. He was hairless and toothless, the color of aged oak and just as strong. Six years ago he had sailed with Blackthorne on the ill-fated search for the Northeast Passage, and each man knew the measure of the other.

“At your age most men are already dead, so you’re ahead of us all.” Blackthorne was thirty-six.

Vinck smiled mirthlessly. “It’s the brandy, Pilot, that an’ fornication an’ the saintly life I’ve led.”

No one laughed. Then someone pointed at a bunk. “Pilot, the bosun’s dead.”

“Then get the body aloft! Wash it and close his eyes! You, you, and you!”

The men were quickly out of their bunks this time and together they half dragged, half carried the corpse from the cabin.

“Take the dawn watch, Vinck. And Ginsel, you’re bow lookout.” “Yes sir.”

Blackthorne went back on deck.

He saw that Hendrik was still awake, that the ship was in order. The relieved lookout, Salamon, stumbled past him, more dead than alive, his eyes puffed and red from the cut of the wind. Blackthorne crossed to the other door and went below. The passageway led to the great cabin aft, which was the Captain-General’s quarters and magazine. His own cabin was starboard and the other, to port, was usually for the three mates. Now Baccus van Nekk, the chief merchant, Hendrik the third mate, and the boy, Croocq, shared it. They were all very sick.

He went into the great cabin. The Captain-General, Paulus Spillbergen, was lying half conscious in his bunk. He was a short, florid man, normally very fat, now very thin, the skin of his paunch hanging slackly in folds. Blackthorne took a water flagon out of a secret drawer and helped him drink a little.

“Thanks,” Spillbergen said weakly. “Where’s land—where’s land?”

“Ahead,” he replied, no longer believing it, then put the flagon away, closed his ears to the whines and left, hating him anew.

Almost exactly a year ago they had reached Tierra del Fuego, the winds favorable for the stab into the unknown of Magellan’s Pass. But the Captain-General had ordered a landing to search for gold and treasure.

“Christ Jesus, look ashore, Captain-General! There’s no treasure in those wastes.”

“Legend says it’s rich with gold and we can claim the land for the glorious Netherlands.”

“The Spaniards have been here in strength for fifty years.”

“Perhaps—but perhaps not this far south, Pilot-Major.”

“This far south the seasons’re reversed. May, June, July, August’re dead winter here. The rutter says the timing’s critical to get through the Straits—the winds turn in a few weeks, then we’ll have to stay here, winter here for months.”

“How many weeks, Pilot?”

“The rutter says eight. But seasons don’t stay the same—”

“Then we’ll explore for a couple of weeks. That gives us plenty of time and then, if necessary, we’ll go north again and sack a few more towns, eh, gentlemen?”

“We’ve got to try now, Captain-General. The Spanish have very few warships in the Pacific. Here the seas are teeming with them and they’re looking for us. I say we’ve got to go on now.”

But the Captain-General had overridden him and put it to a vote of the other captains—not to the other pilots, one English and three Dutch—and had led the useless forays ashore.

The winds had changed early that year and they had had to winter there, the Captain-General afraid to go north because of Spanish fleets. It was four months before they could sail. By then one hundred and fifty-six men in the fleet had died of starvation, cold, and the flux and they were eating the calfskin that covered the ropes. The terrible storms within the Strait had scattered the fleet.
Erasmus
was the only ship that made the rendezvous off Chile. They had waited a month
for the others and then, the Spaniards closing in, had set sail into the unknown. The secret rutter stopped at Chile.

Blackthorne walked back along the corridor and unlocked his own cabin door, relocking it behind him. The cabin was low-beamed, small, and orderly, and he had to stoop as he crossed to sit at his desk. He unlocked a drawer and carefully unwrapped the last of the apples he had hoarded so carefully all the way from Santa Maria Island, off Chile. It was bruised and tiny, with mold on the rotting section. He cut off a quarter. There were a few maggots inside. He ate them with the flesh, heeding the old sea legend that the apple maggots were just as effective against scurvy as the fruit and that, rubbed into the gums, they helped prevent your teeth from falling out. He chewed the fruit gently because his teeth were aching and his gums sore and tender, then sipped water from the wine skin. It tasted brackish. Then he wrapped the remainder of the apple and locked it away.

A rat scurried in the shadows cast by the hanging oil lantern over his head. Timbers creaked pleasantly. Cockroaches swarmed on the floor.

I’m tired. I’m so tired.

He glanced at his bunk. Long, narrow, the straw palliasse inviting.

I’m so tired.

Go to sleep for this hour, the devil half of him said. Even for ten minutes—and you’ll be fresh for a week. You’ve had only a few hours for days now, and most of that aloft in the cold. You must sleep. Sleep. They rely on you….

“I won’t, I’ll sleep tomorrow,” he said aloud, and forced his hand to unlock his chest and take out his rutter. He saw that the other one, the Portuguese one, was safe and untouched and that pleased him. He took a clean quill and began to write: “April 21 1600. Fifth hour. Dusk. 133d day from Santa Maria Island, Chile, on the 32 degree North line of latitude. Sea still high and wind strong and the ship rigged as before. The color of the sea dull gray-green and bottomless. We are still running before the wind along a course of 270 degrees, veering to North North West, making way briskly, about two leagues, each of three miles this hour. Large reefs shaped like a triangle Were sighted at half the hour bearing North East by North half a league distant.

“Three men died in the night of the scurvy—Joris sailmaker, Reiss gunner, 2d mate de Haan. After commending their souls to God, the
Captain-General still being sick, I cast them into the sea without shrouds, for there was no one to make them. Today Bosun Rijckloff died.

“I could not take the declension of the sun at noon today, again due to overcast. But I estimate we are still on course and that landfall in the Japans should be soon….

“But how soon?” he asked the sea lantern that hung above his head, swaying with the pitch of the ship. How to make a chart? There must be a way, he told himself for the millionth time. How to set longitude? There must be a way. How to keep vegetables fresh? What is scurvy…?

“They say it’s a flux from the sea, boy,” Alban Caradoc had said. He was a huge-bellied, great-hearted man with a tangled gray beard.

“But could you boil the vegetables and keep the broth?”

“It sickens, lad. No one’s ever discovered a way to store it.”

“They say that Francis Drake sails soon.”

“No. You can’t go, boy.”

“I’m almost fourteen. You let Tim and Watt sign on with him and he needs apprentice pilots.”

“They’re sixteen. You’re just thirteen.”

“They say he’s going to try for Magellan’s Pass, then up the coast to the unexplored region—to the Californias—to find the Straits of Anian that join Pacific with Atlantic. From the Californias all the way to Newfoundland, the Northwest Passage at long last …”

“The
supposed
Northwest Passage, lad. No one’s proved that legend yet.”

“He will. He’s Admiral now and we’ll be the first English ship through Magellan’s Pass, the first in the Pacific, the first—I’ll never get another chance like this.”

“Oh, yes, you will, and he’ll never breach Magellan’s secret way ’less he can steal a rutter or capture a Portuguese pilot to guide him through. How many times must I tell you—a pilot must have patience. Learn patience, boy. You’ve plen—”

“Please!”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because he’ll be gone two, three years, perhaps more. The weak and the young will get the worst of the food and the least of the water. And of the five ships that go, only his will come back. You’ll never survive, boy.”

“Then I’ll sign for his ship only. I’m strong. He’ll take me!”

“Listen, boy, I was with Drake in
Judith
, his fifty tonner, at San Juan de Ulua when we and Admiral Hawkins—he was in
Minion
—when we fought our way out of harbor through the dung-eating Spaniards. We’d been trading slaves from Guinea to the Spanish Main, but we had no Spanish license for the trade and they tricked Hawkins and trapped our fleet. They’d thirteen great ships, we six. We sank three of theirs, and they sank our
Swallow, Angel, Caravelle
, and the
Jesus of Lubeck
. Oh, yes, Drake fought us out of the trap and brought us home. With eleven men aboard to tell the tale. Hawkins had fifteen. Out of four hundred and eight jolly Jack Tars. Drake is merciless, boy. He wants glory and gold, but only for Drake, and too many men are dead proving it.”

“But I won’t die. I’ll be one of—”

“No. You’re apprenticed for twelve years. You’ve ten more to go and then you’re free. But until that time, until 1588, you’ll learn how to build ships and how to command them—you’ll obey Alban Caradoc, Master Shipwright and Pilot and Member of Trinity House, or you’ll never have a license. And if you don’t have a license, you’ll never pilot
any
ship in English waters, you’ll never command the quarterdeck of
any
English ship in
any
waters because that was good King Harry’s law, God rest his soul. It was the great whore Mary Tudor’s law, may her soul burn in hell, it’s the Queen’s law, may she reign forever, it’s England’s law, and the best sea law that’s ever been.”