Читать книгу Needle-Watcher - Richard Blaker - Страница 10

CHAPTER I

To the fourteen men who beheld it, the scene presented neither beauty nor any other thrill. The eyes of a dozen of them were dulled by habitude, for they were natives—four soldiers and the eight coolies who had carried the visitors over the ten miles of road from Sakai to Osaka.

The two visitors themselves looked upon the sight as they would have looked upon any sight in that world of glare and shadow; or upon no sight at all. Their wits were still astray with fever, their skins broken with sores, their sinews all slack. Rocks of granite hewn into giant ingots and piled into a crag that was a castle meant nothing to them; of no great interest for men so weary were the low battlements encircling the crag, and the glimmer, before the battlements, of the great moat with its rafts of tangled lotus.

A new and peculiar avenue began to flank the road some distance ahead of them. It was of trees that appeared to be not trees at all, but timbers stuck in the ground. They were leafless and branchless, yet with other timbers projecting from them, and upon the projecting cross-timbers were lesser projections and lumps and small festoons. Over them there circled, and upon them squatted, birds.

The visitors took their seats again upon the woven reeds slung to bamboo poles; and the coolies, still chewing morsels of their sudden snack, shouldered them.

A soldier nodded his canopy of straw hat and the procession took the road again.

The stomachs within the visitors still had a sensibility in their haggard emptiness; for it was the movement of their stomachs that led their eyes to discover that the avenue, now on either hand of them, was of squat wooden crosses. Their design was unfamiliar to eyes accustomed to the Holy Pictures of Europe, for they were like the letter H turned on its side and raised a little above the ground on a single stump. Arms and fragments of arms were still held to the upper transverse timbers by lappings of festering cord; upon the lower ones were smears and gobbets of feet once small and shapely.

The Englishman in the hammock on one pole and the Dutchman in the hammock behind him said no word. Their grunts were weary oaths addressed nowhere, produced by the retching of their stomachs as much as by any movement of their brains.

Their bearers, shoulders hunched to the poles whereon their meagre hammocks were slung, spat and trotted on.

A grunt was all that the scene and the stench of it could produce in the throat of Adams, from Gillingham in Kent, on that afternoon of April in the year 1600. For he knew that an end, of one sort or another, was due. He was an old man, spent and infirm; his age was thirty-six.

The Dutchman, as jaded and as broken as himself, was ten years younger.

It was but two years before that they had been young and lusty seamen. For the English seaman of those days—unless he was, happily, the champion-elect of financiers—the only living to be picked up was on coasting-freighters or on privateersmen in the Narrow Seas on the look-out for Hollanders with grain for Lisbon.

For Hollanders the profession was in better sort, since the Flemish seaman in those years had not the Englishman's dearth of sea. As the underling of Spain he had sailed both east and west. Then if he settled down to a quieter life as mariner or master, he came to the Thames with grain car-gezoned to London; or as a prisoner with the prize of grain cargezoned to Lisbon. He had, in either event, told his yarns and made his friends in the taverns of Rotherhithe and Deptford. Desertions from his crew would give him room for an Englishman or two on board his carrack for the return, and would leave polyglot loafers to brag or grumble among the loafers of the Thames and Medway.

The Netherlands' revolt from Spain opened the Dutch ports to Englishmen; and it also left the Dutchman's carrack with no safe and sure destination but England. The waterside gossip of Rotterdam became the gossip of the Thames.

In September of 1597 Melchior van Santvoort, purser of a carrack with grain for Gravesend, was able to tell a tale that won the attention of even so good a sceptic as Timothy Shotten; and Shotten told it to young Will Adams.

Shotten, like Adams, was a pilot and navigator by profession and he had done many things to make a living. He knew the talk of Dutchmen, from campaigning and from captivity among them.

He knew van Santvoort to be a young man of sense; for Shotten had served earlier as master of a fly-boat in Fro-bisher's meagre patrol of the Straits. Twice, before the Netherlands' revolt, he had cut out a carrack on which Santvoort was purser. Shotten knew, each time, that if he had had the master of the carrack to deal with he could have bluffed and browbeaten out of him the bills of lading on Lisbon that would have made of him a prize; but each time the young purser, Santvoort, ambled up and told a tale with a twinkle under one slightly drooped eyelid, of contrary winds and lost bearings, and produced a set of papers in perfect order which showed his carrack to be bound not for Lisbon but for the Thames.

Santvoort was, thereafter, a man to whom Shotten was prepared to listen; and he told in September of 1597 of the return to Rotterdam of ships that had left it two years before for the Spice Islands. They had run the blockade of Spaniards and Portuguese in the Eastern Seas and had rendered a return to the sober merchants who had sent them forth, of two crowns for one.

But Santvoort, the eyelid drooping again as he savoured the liquor in the Gravesend tavern, had more to tell than of things already done. He knew of work that was still ahead for men who were workless; and such men were Shotten himself and his friend Will Adams—trained navigators driven to any shift of gang-supervising or stevedoring for the groats of bare subsistence for themselves and their wives and children.

Santvoort had friends and solid relatives in counting-houses and store-rooms in Rotterdam. A return of two for one was good enough dividend, even if it had been spread over two years. The Zuider Zee was full of ships, the wharves and taverns full of men to sail them. The anxiety of the merchants was not for ships and men, therefore, but for the right ones.

Behind Santvoort was an uncle with a purse to be thrown, with other purses, into a new adventure; and this uncle had a sound opinion of Santvoort himself. They had seamen enough among the swashbucklers from the dismantled garrisons. What they wanted most was pilots.

Santvoort talked of these things even more slowly than was his habit, lest his English friends and hosts over the bottle should miss a word; for both of them were known pilots. With all due allowances made for the liquor, he had reason for his well-wishing towards Shotten; Shotten had dealt with him fairly in the old blockade-running days. In his well-wishing towards the younger man and new acquaintance, Adams, there was no reason at all.

It was simply that he liked him; and five minutes of half-understood conversation were enough to discover that Adams, too, was unemployed—a seaman with a wife and children at Gillingham, but without a sea.

For Adams there followed eight months of some anxiety whether he should get this job through the offices of the friendly young Dutchman. In the end he did get it—after shipping across to Rotterdam and back again in a dozen paltry berths.

In June of 1598 the adventure was ready and five carracks sailed out of the Zuider Zee for the Indies. Shotten and Adams were both aboard—Shotten in the flagship of the Admiral of the fleet and Adams pilot-major of the Liefde.

The influence of Santvoort had gone further than giving Adams his post; it had shipped Adams's young brother also on the Liefde as a mariner.

Within a year of sailing the brother had been killed in an ambush by islanders off the coast of Peru. Shotten, with the admiral, was lost in "a wondrous storm of wind, with much rain."

The friends left to Adams were the new ones made among a crew of a hundred and twenty men in a vessel eighty to a hundred feet long. Of the five ships only the Liefde was still afloat.

When she sighted Japan after two years at sea, only twenty-four men of her crew were still alive; and of the twenty-four only Adams and Santvoort and five others could stand upon their feet.

For five months she had ridden the Pacific with Adams seeking "the Northern Cape of the Island of Japon in a height of thirty degrees." He found it not—"by reason that it lay falce in all charts and globes and maps."

Dismasted; with a jury-rig of whatever spars and rags and tackle the invalids could drag from sodden lockers to splice together and bend and hoist; with a rudder that squeaked and wagged at its gudgeons, she tottered at last into the calm of Bungo-nada, between Shikoku and Kiushiu.

Her timbers still held together. Enough pitch remained in her seams to make of pumping a task possible for a team of scarecrows. She still, in a manner, answered the helm—and so the scarecrows had dragged aside a half-world and flung it behind them and arrived at the "Island of Japon" which Lintschoten's map had shown them, falsely, to lie in the thirtieth degree of latitude.

They were not yet ashore, but they were as near as made no difference.

Adams was in command; for the captain was a skeleton below, moaning and gurgling in a skin of verminous parchment.

It was the pilot himself who went forward with the top-mawl and struck out the wedge that let the anchor fall. It fell fair, symbolical of their victory and their surrender.

The effectives mustered, seven scarecrows about the mainmast's stump, to watch countless specks growing out of the blur of land that lay on the water; but they exchanged no word. A thought of the Liefde's armament would have been an ironic jest. The gun-ports had been stoutly battened in the crew's lustier days against lusty seas, and no gunner was among the survivors. A day's work of the whole seven might have found in the powder-magazine a single pistol-charge that was not a damp paste. As for pikes or cutlasses—the single swing of the mawl had left Adams panting for breath.

They watched the specks, and said nothing. When the specks were a mob of peculiar skiffs made fast to the Liefde's sides and grappled to one another, they still said nothing. Their old world was dragged aside and flung behind. To criticise the new one they had no wits; to resist it they had no strength.

Little men were aboard, swarming all over the ship; nimble, chattering, and most amiably smiling. Adams and Santvoort and the others stood and watched things go—upon the shoulders and in the hands of the nimble little men. Charts and globes and maps went; instruments, and whatever was left of the carpenter's and sailmaker's tools. The pictures went from the cuddy and the saloon.

Apathetically Adams showed a man how the hawser was wound upon the capstan, to prevent his cutting the cable and losing the newly-dropped anchor.

Oars splashed in the din, and the Liefde was atow westward to the harbour. Still the seven said no word, for their destinies had passed from their own hands to the hands of the palely swarthy little men in the boats who chattered and smiled and towed them to the shore and did not—for some reason—kill them.