“The walls of all these rooms are plastered with something they get from a gourd plant, grind up and mix with water. There are some preservatives that I haven’t checked out yet, but have you looked at the paper they use? It’s not really paper! It’s the leaf of a plant that grows without the usual veins in it. They just harvest it, press it flat while it’s drying, and use it. It even turns white by itself as it dries.”
I said, “So it’s like you were saying the other day, they do have a technology, but a very different technology than ours.”
“Right. And there’s a bloody huge fortune to be made from both sides by getting them together. We could do these people here a world of good by setting up a trading company.”
“For which we need the boat. Incidentally, with your permission, partner, I’ve already taken the first small step toward our commercial empire here. Roxanna wanted to hire some fishermen and put The Concrete Canoe to work as a fishing boat. We never really used it much, and we’ve still got the inflatable life raft, so I told her to go ahead. That okay by you?”
“Sure, and I’m way ahead of you, boss. I had some fishnet makers in earlier today, and got them started on a two-mile-long drift net, something these people never heard of. Did I mention that this hemp of theirs doesn’t rot, either? Whatever that stuff is, it sure ain’t cellulose!”
“Drift nets? Isn’t there some kind of international agreement restricting their use?”
“Who cares? The duke here never signed any international agreements, so where does some foreign country get off, telling him how to fish? And even if he had, do you think somebody’s going to catch us using them? Hell, boss, they haven’t even found this whole damn floating island yet!”
“Yeah, Adam, and why haven’t they? I think that bothers me more than anything else.”
“Me too. But for now, let’s get the girls to pack a picnic lunch and go down to the boat.”
SIXTEEN
We made quite a procession, what with Adam and his six bearers, both of his lady friends, who were dying to see the ship, all of his servants except his three gardeners, plus Felicia and me. It was past noon when we got there, and within minutes Roxanna showed up with four fishermen in tow. We broke out the lunch we’d carried with us and augmented it from our ship’s stores.
After some time spent on exclamations about the strange and wondrous things we’d brought (like paper plates and catsup in plastic bottles), the subject of conversation got around to the remuneration that Adam and I owed to the island’s people for rescuing us and saving all of our property. It seems that local custom was for us to decide such things, rather than for them to present us with an exaggerated bill for us to argue over, as it would have been done in the outside world.
Our three ladies were of the opinion that each of the three-hundred-odd workers who had each spent two days lugging in our equipment, all the supplies, and the boat itself should each receive the equivalent of two cents worth of silver. This ridiculously low fee embarrassed us Americans. I mean, we’re not the kind of people who hire scab labor. After some haggling with our womenfolk, we settled on a quarter to each man and woman. The guards at the door were each to get the same, with some of them already having been paid. The shire reeve was to get twice that, and various other officials, including the lady doctor who had patched us up, got up to a whole dollar.
Indoor real estate rented cheap in the Western Islands. Eight silver quarters rented us the warehouse for the next two years. We didn’t argue about that, since landlords generally get more than they deserve.
When the ladies worked their way up to the duke, the tables were suddenly turned, and while we were trying to hold them back, they were trying to give away the store. The duke, they felt, should get one third of our gold, and the archbishop and the warlock one sixth each! Plus the same distribution in silver. This was something like a hundred thousand dollars, cash money American! And in a place where a quarter dollar fed a family for a year! The ladies simply felt that since we had it, the patriotic thing to do was to give it to the government.
I tell you, the IRS would have loved these women.
I couldn’t see why we should volunteer to give them anything. Who ever heard of voluntarily giving money to the government? Governments always went in and stole whatever they wanted anyway. The only thing that ever slowed them down was the fact that they wanted you to be alive and productive so they could rob you again next year. If we started out being that generous, it would only whet their appetites. Look what happened when Montezuma sent whole baskets full of gold to Cortés, eh? And I should give real money to the bastards who run the local religion racket? No way, baby!
Adam, on the other hand, felt that a little cumshaw was a good idea, sort of like donating to the Policeman’s Benevolent Fund. “Hey, it’s good politics,” he said.
We argued for more than an hour. In the end, we decided on two pounds of gold and four of silver for the duke, and half that for each of the other two high- muckety-mucks.
Even then, I insisted that Adam give all the money to the church, while I took care of the warlock. We went along with a suggestion from the ladies and threw in some other gifts in addition to the money. Some dinnerware and glasses, a few air mattresses, some food and drink, and a few dozen of the felt- tip pens that Roxanna was particularly taken with.
During all this time the servants just sat around, ignored, and astounded by the conversation. Nobody worked by the hour, so the general feeling was that their time wasn’t worth very much.
“Okay,” I said at last, throwing Roxanna the keys to the strongboxes. “You girls make up the lists as to who gets what, and count or weigh it all out. Adam and I have to get busy with the boat.”
Before we could get into what should be repaired and how, there was the matter of the four fishermen and The Concrete Canoe.
It was a canoe to the extent of being pointed at both ends, but that was about it. In general proportions, it was more like a tubby whaleboat, or a fat lifeboat. Twenty feet long, it was seven feet wide and five high. It had an easily set up aluminum mast and was sloop-rigged with Dacron sails. It also had a small diesel inboard motor, and it was this motor that gave the fishermen trouble.
The sails were no problem, although they said that they would have preferred a gaff-rigged mainsail to the Bermuda rig we had. While the sail stays we used were new to them, they soon understood what they were for without any difficulty. They had never seen anything like a retractable centerboard, but once it was explained to them, they loved the idea. They adapted to what we had with surprising rapidity, especially considering that the local boats were more like kayaks than anything else I was familiar with, and we were told that the frames had more whale bone in them than wood. In fact, many of the things that I had taken for wood turned out to be bone with a sort of glued on cloth covering, to improve the tensile strength.
You see, locally, wood was incredibly expensive. Every single possible square foot on the island was in use for agriculture, and even so they were just barely able to keep people fed. To grow a single log, they had to take a fair-sized piece of farmland out of production for many years. Thus, a lightweight, cloth-covered frame made a lot of sense. When they needed more workspace for nets, equipment, and so on, they used two kayaks lashed together into a catamaran.
The fishing nets Adam had ordered wouldn’t be ready for a few weeks, but our modern rods and reels would work for the time being. The fishermen were at first awestruck at being trusted with something as fabulously valuable as our fishing reels obviously were to them. Metals of any kind were extremely valuable on the Western Isles. I suppose that it was like giving a group of American carpenters a bunch of solid diamond hammers and telling them to go to work.
On finding out how weak (by their standards) our fishing lines were, they were soon talking about replacing them with the local product, for fear of losing a valuable hook or spinner. Nonetheless, they picked up on casting and reeling in pretty quickly. Actually, they were a very intelligent bunch of guys, a lot sharper than the sort of workers that you likely would have hired off the street in downtown Bay City.