‘There,’ said
Jack, pointing upwards. ‘Abaft the topsailyard, right up against the trestletrees.
Have you ever seen that before?’
‘The thing like a tablecloth pulled out at one corner?’ asked Stephen, who could be sadly disappointing on occasion.
‘Well, it is a mizen topgallant staysail,’ said Jack, who had expected little more. ‘You can tell your grandchildren you saw one.’ They walked back to the quarterdeck and resumed the pacing; Jack accommodating his long-legged stride to keep in step.
‘As I understand it,’ said Stephen, ‘we keep our appointment with Tom Pullings off the False Natunas and then drop Fox in Java to take an Indiaman home; but is it not a strangely roundabout way, as if one should go from Dublin to Cork by way of Athlone?’
‘Yes. His Excellency was good enough to point that out to me yesterday – perhaps he showed you the same map- – and I will make the same reply to you as I did to him: as the prevailing winds lie at this season, it is quicker to go back to Batavia by the False Natunas than by the Banka Strait. And then’ (lowering his voice) ‘which is more to my purpose though not perhaps to his, there is our rendezvous.’
‘Well, I am content. There is, I presume, a convenient harbour in the False Natunas? And, by the way, why False? Are the inhabitants unusually treacherous?’
‘Oh no. There is no harbour. That is only a sea-going expression, a hyperbole, as I believe you would say: they are only a parcel of uninhabited rocks, like the Dry Salvages.
It is understood that we cruise for a week in their latitude or in fact a trifle south of it. Their longitude has not yet been fixed with any certainty, but as you know we can be reasonably sure of our latitude; and so we cruise along it, a glass at every masthead, and at night we may lie to, with a lantern in each top. As for their being false . .
The ship’s bell stopped him in mid-stride, mid-sentence, and together they hurried below, their mouths watering steadily.
‘. . . as for their being false,’ said Jack, after a long and busy pause, ‘that arose when the Dutch were- first making their
conquests in these parts. The master of some ship bound for the real Natunas but who was sadly out in his dead-reckoning, raised them one foggy morning and cried, “I have made the perfect landfall! Ain’t I the cheese!” The Dutch cheese of course, ha, ha, ha! But, however, when the mist lifted they proved to be these mere God-damned barren rocks, looming large in the thick weather; so he put them down in his chart as the False Natunas.
The South China Sea is full of places like that, imperfectly fixed, mistaken for one another; and vast areas outside the Indiamen’s track are not charted at all – just hearsay of islands, reefs and shoals picked up from proas or junks that can only give the vaguest of bearings for the places they are talking about.’
‘I am sure you are right. Yet it does seem strange to a landsman. These are populated waters: at this very moment I can see. . .’ He was looking out of the stern-window, his eyes narrowed against the brilliance of the day.’. . . six, no, seven vessels: two junks, one large proa, four small things with outriggers paddling fast, whether fishermen or pirates on a modest scale I cannot tell.’
‘It is just as occasion offers, I believe. In the South China Sea, by all accounts, the rule is to take anything you can overcome, and avoid or trade with anything you cannot.’
‘I am afraid it was much the same with us until very recently. I have read strange accounts of Maelsechlinn the Wise, son of
-‘ Erc and he the kindest of men by land. But these are populated waters, as I was saying, and the Chinese who sail them belong to a very highly civilized, literate community, while the Malays are by no means ignorant of letters, as we know very well.
Why, then, do we swim in this cloud of uncertainty?’
‘Because junks never draw more than a few feet of water – they are flat bottomed – and proas even less. Whereas a ship the line, a seventy-four, draws 22 or 23; even our light raught aft is close on fourteen foot, and with stores and all very much more: I am never happy unless we have at least four fathoms under our keel even in smooth weather. A shoal that a junk would scarcely notice, much less mark down, might rip our bottom out as easy as kiss my hand. These are the very words I shall use when I explain sailing in uncharted waters elsewhere, after dinner,’ he said with the significant look that often passed between them in this sounding-box of a divided cabin.
Stephen nodded, put his perfectly clean skeleton on to the dish in the middle, took another Java sea-perch, looked at Jack’s unseemly heap of bones, and observed, ‘You have to be a Papist to eat fish, I find. Pray tell me how you arrange private meetings at sea, half the world apart.’
‘They cannot be at all precise, at such a distance, but it is remarkable how often they answer. The usual thing is to give three or four cruising-grounds, always if possible near some island where a message can be left after the agreed cruising-time is over; and then if circumstances call for it we set a final rendezvous where one or the other can lie at anchor until a stated time. Ours is Sydney Cove.’
‘So if we should not meet this time, we have another chance?’
‘I will not deceive you, Stephen: we do have another chance. In fact we have three other chances – a week each side of the next two full moons, and then of course in New South Wales.’
‘What joy. I long to see the Surprise and all our friends again
– I long to tell Martin of my dear ape, my tarsier, that rarest of primates, my enormous beetle, whole unknown genera of orchids. What is amiss, brother? Have you a flogging to deal with?’
‘No. Just a disagreeable little matter to clear up.’ Killick and Ahmed came in, the one bearing a roly-poly pudding and the other a sauce-boat of custard. ‘Killick,’ said Jack,
‘just jump round to the other side, will you: my compliments, and will His Excellency be at leisure for a few minutes in half an hour.’
Fox had never been liked in the Diane, but until Batavia he had given little active offence, while his secretary, Edwards, was positively esteemed, in a quiet way, by both officers and foremast hands. But since the envoy’s behaviour at Prabang, his ignoring of the people belonging to the ship that had taken him there, his total indifference to their pleasure at the
signing of the treaty, his treatment of the Marine guard – ‘airs and graces and all turn out to present arms every time the bugger puts his nose out of doors and not so much as a half bottle to drink the King’s health even at the end when him and his friends was as pissed as Davy’s sow’ – and of the seamen who rowed him to and fro, this absence of liking had grown into strong reprobation. His suite, of course, and their servants, had been unpopular from the beginning; but they were only passengers, and of passengers, landsmen at that, nothing could be expected. The present dislike of Fox was on another plane altogether; it was personal, not directed against a class, and it was so marked that a man far more insensitive than Fox must be conscious of it.
‘You may say what you please,’ said Jack, ‘but I have eaten roly-poly within the Arctic Circle, damned nearly within the Antarctic, and now under the equator, and I am of opinion that it has not its equal.’
‘Except, perhaps, for spotted dog.’
‘Ah, you have a point there, Stephen.’
They drank their coffee and presently Jack said, ‘I hope to be back in five minutes.’
He was not back in five minutes, and Stephen sat there by the pot – how the coffee retained its heat in this climate! – reflecting. He knew that last night some one of the mission had mounted to the dark quarterdeck, had approached Warren, the officer of the watch, just as the ship was wearing on to the larboard tack, had been intercepted by Reade, had cuffed the boy aside and had told Warren that he should make more sail, that the Captain would certainly wish it for the King’s service, that this miserable pace was dawdling away precious time. But he hoped that Jack would not take the matter up before Fox had to some extent recovered from his present state of over-excitement: a foolish hope, perhaps, since a thing of this kind had to be taken up at once to prevent any recurrence (the offence in naval eyes was very grave) and since there were no signs of Fox’s restless enthusiasm declining at all.