The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

by David Mitchell

  “So let the games,” declares Chigwin, “begin!”

  Chigwin and Jones each shake one chicken into a state of terror.

  The dozen or so men in the galley chant in unison, “A-one, a-two, a-three!”

  Chigwin and Jones snip off their hens’ heads with a pair of shears and set them on the galley deck. The men cheer the blood-spouting headless corpses as they skid and flap. Half a minute later, when Jones’s fowl is still kicking on its side, the referee pronounces Chigwin’s “One dead fowl, boys.” Coins change hands from scowlers to gloaters, and the birds are taken to the benches for plucking and gutting.

  Penhaligon could punish the servants with the feeble charge of disrespect to the officers’ dinner but carries on past the galley to the sick bay. Its wooden partitions reach not quite to the ceiling, allowing a little light in and disease-bearing airs out. “Nay nay nay, you headless tit, it goes like this …” The speaker is Michael Tozer, another Cornishman sent as a volunteer by the captain’s brother Charlie to the Dragon, the brig whose second lieutenancy Penhaligon held eleven years ago. Tozer’s band of ten—now all able seamen—have followed their patron ever since. His broken and tuneless voice sings:

  Don’t you see the ships a-comin’?

  Don’t you see them in full sail?

  Don’t you see the ships a-comin’

  With the prizes at their tail?

  Oh, my little rollin’ sailor,

  Oh, my little rollin’ he;

  I do love a jolly sailor,

  Gay and merry might he be.

  “’Tweren’t ‘gay,’ Michael Tozer,” objects a voice, “’twere ‘blithe.’”

  “‘Gay,’ ‘blithe’—who humps a hog? What matters is what’s next, so cork it:

  Sailors they get all the money,

  Soldiers they get none but brass;

  Oh, I do love a drink-me-down sailor,

  But soldiers may all kiss my arse.

  Oh, my little rolling sailor,

  Oh, my little rolling he;

  I do love a jolly sailor,

  Soldiers may be damned for me.

  “That’s what the Gosport whores sing, and I’d know, ’cause I had one after the glorious First o’ June an’ sunk my fork up her figgy-dowdy—”

  “Though come mornin’,” says the voice, “she’d gone with his prize money.”

  “’Tain’t the point: the point is, we’ll be pluckin’ Dutch merchantmen stuffed with the reddest, goldest copper on God’s beautiful globe.”

  Captain Penhaligon stoops through the sick bay’s entrance. The half dozen bed-bound inmates stiffen to guilty attention, and the loblolly, a pock-scarred Londoner called Rafferty, stands, putting to one side the tray of tenaculums, ball scoops, and bone rasps he is oiling. “Afternoon, sir. The surgeon’s down on the orlop deck. Shall I send for him?”

  “No, Mr. Rafferty. I make my rounds, is all. Are you mending, Mr. Tozer?”

  “Can’t say my chest is better knitted than last week, sir, but I’m grateful to be here at all. ’Twas a fair old fall without a pair of wings. An’ Mr. Waldron’s been saying as he’ll find a space for me on one of his guns, so I look on it as a chance to learn a new trade an’ all.”

  “That’s the spirit, Tozer, that’s the spirit.” Penhaligon turns to Tozer’s young neighbor. “Jack Fletcher: do I have it?”

  “Jack Thatcher, beggin’ your pardon, sir.”

  “Your pardon, Jack Thatcher. What brings you to the sick bay?”

  Rafferty answers for the blushing youth: “Big round of applause, Captain.”

  “The clap? A souvenir of Penang, no doubt. How far advanced?”

  Rafferty answers again: “Mr. Snaky’s as scarlet as a Roman bishop’s hat, sir, an’ oozin’ curds, an’ Jack’s one eye’s all blurry, an’ widdlin’s a torture, is it not, lad? He’s been fed his mercury, but there’ll be no shuntyin’ along the yards for a while yet ….”

  To blame, Penhaligon reflects, is the navy’s policy of charging sailors for the treatment of venereal disease, thereby encouraging the men to try every sea-daddy’s cure before coming to the ship’s surgeon. When I am made a peer in the lords, thinks Penhaligon, I shall rectify this pious folly. The captain, too, once contracted the French Disease at an officers-only bagnio on St. Kitts and was too scared and too shy to speak to the Trincomolee’s surgeon, until passing water was the purest agony. Were he a petty officer still, he’d share this story with Jack Thatcher, but a captain should not dent his authority. “One trusts you learned the true price a doxy’s cully must pay, Thatcher?”

  “I’ll not forget it in a hurry, sir, this I swear.”

  Yet you’ll lie with another, Penhaligon foresees, and another, and another … He speaks briefly with the other patients: a feverish landsman pressed at St. Ives, whose crushed thumb may or may not have to come off; a luckier Bermudan, glassy-eyed with pain from an abscessed molar; and a Shetlander with more beard than face and a severe case of Barbados leg, which has swollen his testicles to the size of mangoes. “I’m fit as a smashed fiddle,” he reports, “God bless you for asking, Captain.”

  Penhaligon rises to leave.

  “Beg pardon, sir,” asks Michael Tozer, “might you settle a dispute for us?”

  Pain shoots through Penhaligon’s foot. “If I may, Mr. Tozer.”

  “Shall sailors in sick bay still get their rightful slice of the prize, sir?”

  “The naval rule book, which I uphold, states that the answer is yes.”

  Tozer fires an “I told you so” glare at Rafferty. Penhaligon is tempted to quote the proverb about birds in hands and bushes but leaves the Phoebus’s rising morale untouched. “There are some miscellaneous matters,” he tells the loblolly, “on which I should like to consult Surgeon Nash, after all. He is most likely in his cabin down below, you mentioned?”

  A MONGREL STINK smothers the captain as he descends, step by jolting step, to the berth deck. It is dark, cold, and damp in winter, and dark, hot, and airless in the summer: “snug,” the ratings call it. In unhappy ships, despised officers are well advised not to venture too far from the companionways, but John Penhaligon has no undue worries. The larboard watch, about a hundred and ten men, are sewing or whittling in the wells of dim light from above, or moaning, shaving, or curling up for a catnap in improvised booths between sea chests, hammocks being unstrung during the day. The captain’s shoes and buckles are recognized before the rest of him: a cry rings out, “Captain on deck, lads!” The nearest sailors stand to attention, and the captain is gratified that resentment at his intrusion is concealed, at least. He hides the pain in his feet. “I’m on my way down to the orlop, lads. As you were.”

  “Shall y’ be needin’ a lantern or a support, sir?” one of the men asks.

  “No need. Blindfolded, I’d find my way around my Phoebus’s guts.”

  He continues down to the orlop deck. It reeks of bilgewater, though not, as on a captured French ship he once inspected, of decayed corpses. Water sloshes, the sea’s belly churns, and the pumps clunk and squelp. Penhaligon grunts as he reaches the bottom and half feels his way down the narrow passage. His fingertips identify the powder store; the cheese hold; the grog store, with its heavy padlock; the cabin of Mr. Woods, the boys’ careworn tutor; the rope store; the surgeon’s dispensary; and, last, a cabin no bigger than his water closet. Bronze light escapes and boxes are shifted. “It is I, Mr. Nash—the Captain.”

  “Captain.” Nash’s voice is a husky West Country wheeze. “What a surprise.” His lamplit face appears, like a fanged mole, betraying no surprise at all.

  “Mr. Rafferty said I might find you here, Surgeon.”

  “Aye, I came down for sulfide of lead.” He places a folded blanket on the chest by way of a cushion. “Take the weight off your feet, if you’d care to. Your gout bites back, does it, sir?”

  The tall man fills the poky cabin. “Is it so obvious, then?”

  “Professional instinct, sir … Might I inspect the area?”r />
  Awkwardly, the captain removes his boot and sock and places his foot on a trunk. Nash brings his lamp close, his apron stiff and rustling with dried blood, and frowns at Penhaligon’s maroon swellings. “An angry tophus on the metatarsus … but no secretions, as yet?”

  “None as yet, but it’s looking damned similar to this time last year.”

  Nash pokes at the swelling, and Penhaligon’s foot jerks in pain.

  “Surgeon, the Nagasaki mission cannot afford for me to be invalided.”

  Nash polishes his glasses on his grimy cuffs. “I prescribe Dover’s remedy. It speeded your recovery in Bengal; it may postpone the attack this time. I want six ounces of blood from you, too, to reduce friction against the arteries.”

  “Let us waste no more time.” Penhaligon removes his coat and rolls up his shirtsleeves, while Nash decants liquids from three different medicine bottles. Nobody could accuse the surgeon of being one of those gentleman physicians one occasionally meets in the service, men who adorn the wardroom with erudition and verve. This steady Devonian can amputate one limb per minute during engagements, pull teeth with a steady hand, bend his accounts no more than is decent, and never blab about officers’ complaints to the ratings. “Remind me, Mr. Nash, what goes into this Dover’s.”

  “A variant of ipecacuanha powder, sir, being opium, ipecac, saltpeter, tartar, and licorice.” He measures out a spatula of pale powder. “Were you a common Jack, I’d add castoreum—what the medical fraternity call rancid cod oil—so you’d feel properly physicked. This trick I tend to spare the officers.”

  The ship rolls, and her timbers creak like a barn in a gale.

  “Have you considered turning apothecary ashore, Mr. Nash?”

  “Not I, sir.” Nash does not smile at the pleasantry.

  “I can see Nash’s Patented Elixir arrayed in a row of china bottles.”

  “Men of commerce, sir”—Nash counts out laudanum drops into the pewter beaker—“for the most part, had their consciences cut out at birth. Better an honest drowning than slow death by hypocrisy, law, or debt.” He stirs the compound and hands the beaker to his patient. “Down in a single draft, Captain.”

  Penhaligon obeys and winces. “Rancid cod oil may improve it.”

  “I shall bring a dosage daily, sir. Now for the bloodletting.” He produces a bleeding dish and a rusty lancet and holds the captain’s forearm. “My sharpest blade: you shan’t feel a—”

  Penhaligon bites on his ouch!, his oath, and a shudder of pain.

  “—thing.” Nash inserts the catheter to prevent scabbing. “Now …”

  “Stay still. I know.” Slow drips of blood form a puddle in the dish.

  To distract himself, Penhaligon thinks about dinner.

  “PAID INFORMERS,” AVOWS Lieutenant Hovell, after half-drunk Daniel Snitker has been helped to his cabin to sleep off his mountainous dinner, “serve up that same dish their patrons most wish to”—the ship sways, shudders, and the bulkhead lamps circle in their gimbals—“dine upon. During his ambassadorship at The Hague, my father placed the word of one informer of conscience above the affidavits of ten spies working for lucre. Now, this is not to say that Snitker is ipso facto deceiving us, but we are well advised to swallow not a crumb of his ‘prize intelligence’ without further verification—least of all his sunny prediction that the Japanese shall watch us seize their ancient ally’s assets without so much as a murmur.”

  At a nod from Penhaligon, Chigwin and Jones begin clearing the table.

  “The European war is no damned concern of the bloody Asiatics.” Major Cutlip, only a shade or two less scarlet than his marines’ jacket, sucks a last shred of meat from his chicken drumstick.

  “A point of view,” says Hovell, “the bloody Asiatics may not share, Major.”

  “Let them be”—Cutlip snorts—“taught to share it, Mr. Hovell.”

  “Suppose the kingdom of Siam maintained a trading post at Bristol—”

  Cutlip glances at Second Lieutenant Wren with a knowing grin.

  “—at Bristol,” Hovell carries on, undeterred, “for a century and a half, until one fine day a Chinese junk-of-war sailed in, seized our ally’s assets with never a by-your-leave, and announced to London that henceforth they shall take the place of the Siamese. Would Prime Minister Pitt accept such terms?”

  “When next Mr. Hovell’s critics,” says Wren, “lampoon his humorlessness …”

  Penhaligon knocks over the salt cellar and throws a pinch over his shoulder.

  “… I shall confound them with his fantasia of a Siamese factory in Bristol!”

  “The issue is sovereignty,” states Robert Hovell. “The comparison is apt.”

  Cutlip wags his drumstick. “If eight years in New South Wales taught me anything at all, it’s that well-read notions like ‘sovereignty’ or ‘rights’ or ‘property’ or ‘jurisprudence’ or ‘diplomacy’ mean one thing to whites but another to the backward races. Poor Phillip at Sydney Cove, he did his damnedest to ‘negotiate’ with the raggle-taggle backward blacks we found there. Did his fine ideals stop the lazy shit weasels filching our supplies like they owned the place?” Cutlip spits in the spittoon. “It’s red-blooded Englishmen and London muskets who lay down the law in the colonies, not any lily-livered ‘diplomacy,’ and it’ll be twenty-four guns and forty well-drilled marines who win the day in Nagasaki, too. One can only hope”—he winks at Wren—“that the first lieutenant’s delightful Chinese bedmate in Bengal did not tinge his Caucasian spotlessness a shade yellow, hey?”

  What is it, Penhaligon groans inwardly, about the Marine Corps?

  A bottle slides off the table into the young hands of Third Lieutenant Talbot.

  “Does your remark,” Hovell asks in a deadly calm voice, “impugn my courage as a naval officer, or is it my loyalty to the king that you denigrate?”

  “Now, come, Robert: Cutlip knows you”—there are times, Penhaligon thinks, when I am less a captain and more a governess—“too well to do either. He was just … just …”

  “Dispensing a little affectionate elbowing,” says Lieutenant Wren.

  “The most trivial quip!” Cutlip protests, all charm. “Affectionate elbowing …”

  “The wit was sharp,” Wren judges, “but wholly lacking in malice.”

  “… and I apologize unconditionally,” adds Cutlip, “for any offense caused.”

  The readiest apologies, Penhaligon observes, carry the littlest worth.

  “Major Cutlip should mind ‘his sharp wit,’” says Hovell, “lest he cut himself.”

  “Is it your plan, Mr. Talbot,” Penhaligon asks, “to smuggle that bottle out?”

  Talbot takes the question seriously for a moment; then he smiles with relief and fills the company’s glasses. Penhaligon orders Chigwin to bring another couple of bottles of the Chambolle Musigny. The steward is surprised by such generosity so late on but goes to fetch them.

  Penhaligon senses that a ruling is required. “Were our single objective in Nagasaki to dispossess Jan Compagnie, we could be as direct as the major advocates. Our orders, however, urge us also to negotiate a treaty with the Japanese. We must be diplomats as well as warriors.”

  Cutlip picks his nose. “Guns make the best diplomats, Captain.”

  Hovell dabs his lips. “Belligerence shan’t impress these natives.”

  “Did we subdue the Indians by gentleness?” Wren leans back. “Did the Dutch conquer the Javans by gifts of Edam cheese?”

  “The analogy is unsound,” argues Hovell. “Japan is in Asia but not of Asia.”

  Wren asks, “Another of your Gnostic utterances, Lieutenant?”

  “To speak of ‘the Indians’ or ‘the Javanese’ is a European conceit: in truth, these are a patchwork of peoples, fissile and divisible. Japan, contrariwise, was unified four hundred years ago and expelled the Spanish and Portuguese even at the zenith of Iberian might—”

  “Pit our artillery, cannonades, and riflemen against their quaint medieval jo
usters and—” With his lips and hands, the major imitates an explosion.

  “Quaint medieval jousters,” Hovell replies, “whom you have never even seen.”

  Better teredo worm in the hull, thinks Penhaligon, than bickering officers.

  “No more than have you,” says Wren. “Snitker, however—”

  “Snitker is with child to regain his little kingdom and humiliate his usurpers.”

  In the wardroom below, Mr. Waldron’s fiddle strikes up a jig.

  Someone, at least, thinks Penhaligon, is enjoying the evening.

  Lieutenant Talbot opens his mouth to speak but closes it again.

  Penhaligon says, “You wish to speak, Mr. Talbot?”

  Talbot is unnerved by all the eyes. “Nothing of consequence, sir.”

  Jones drops a plate of cutlery with an almighty clatter.

  “By the by,” Cutlip says, transferring his snot to the tablecloth, “I overheard a pair of your Cornishmen, Captain, making a joke about Mr. Hovell’s home county. I repeat it without fear of offense, now we know he is man enough to enjoy a little affectionate elbowing: What, pray, is a Yorkshireman?”

  Robert Hovell rotates his wedding ring around his finger.

  “‘A Scot, by Jove, with the generosity squeezed out!’”

  The captain regrets ordering the bottles of ’91.

  Why must all things, Penhaligon wonders, go around in stupid circles?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  AN UNCERTAIN PLACE

  An uncertain time

  JACOB DE ZOET PURSUES THE LINKBOY’S LAMP ALONG A PUTRID canal and into the nave of Domburg church. Geertje sets a roasted goose on the altar table. The linkboy, whose eyes are Asian and hair is copper, quotes, “I will incline mine ear to a parable, Papa; I will open my dark saying upon the harp.” Jacob is aghast. An illegitimate son? He turns to Geertje but finds the soured landlady of his makeshift lodgings in Batavia. “You don’t even know his mother, do you?” Unico Vorstenbosch finds all this inordinately funny and plucks meat from the half-eaten goose. The fowl lifts its crisped head and quotes, “Let them melt away as waters which run continually: when he bendeth his bow to shoot his arrows, let them be as cut to pieces.” The goose flies through a bamboo grove, through slanted bars of light dark and dark dark, and Jacob flies, too, until they reach a clearing where the head of John the Baptist glowers from its Delftware dish. “Eighteen years in the Orient with nothing to show but a bastard half-breed!”