The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World

by Neal Stephenson

  For her part Minerva had sailed almost due east for fifteen hundred miles to the Marianas, passing the Manila Galleon somewhere along the way.

  Now they sailed north out of those islands without ever catching sight of her. This was just as well for all involved in the conspiracy—including all of the Galleon’s officers. The bored Jesuits and soldiers scattered among those islands would see the Galleon, and would see Minerva, but would never see them together.

  Weather made it impossible to observe the sun or look for the Galleon’s sails for two days after they put the Marianas behind them. Then the sun came out, and they traversed the Tropic of Cancer and sighted the Galleon’s topsails, far to the east, at almost the same moment. It was the fifteenth of September. Even before the northernmost of the burning islands of the Marianas had sunk below the southern horizon, they had gone off soundings, which meant that their sounding-lead, even when it was fully paid out, dangled miles above the floor of an ocean whose depth was literally unfathomable. After several days had gone by without sighting land they had brought Minerva’s anchors up on deck and stowed them deep in the hold.

  They traversed the thirtieth parallel, which meant that they had reached the latitude of southern Japan. Still they continued north. They could not keep the Galleon in sight all the time, of course. But it was not necessary to follow in her wake. They had only two requirements. One was to discover the magic latitude, known only to the Spanish, that would take them safely to California. The other was to arrive in Acapulco at about the same time as the Galleon, so that certain officers aboard that ship could smooth the way for them. With her narrow hull Minerva could not carry as many provisions as the Galleon, but she could sail faster, and so the general plan was to speed across the Pacific and then tarry off California for a few weeks, surviving on the fresh water and game of that country, while keeping a lookout for the Galleon.

  But they could not bolt east until they were sure of the right latitude, and so every day they posted lookouts at the top of Minerva’s foremast and had them scan the horizon for the sails of the Manila Galleon. Having sighted her, they would plot a converging course, and creep closer until they could see how her sails had been trimmed. The winds almost always came from the southeastern quarter of the compass rose, and every time they caught sight of the Galleon she seemed to be going free, which was a way of saying that the wind was coming in from behind her and from one side—in this case, the starboard. In other words the Galleon’s captain was still bending all his efforts to gain latitude, and seemed not to know or care that he had five thousand miles to cover eastwards; or that every degree he went north was a degree he’d later have to go south (Manila and Acapulco lying at nearly the same latitude).

  They spent a few days becalmed at thirty-two degrees, then advanced due north to thirty-six degrees, then encountered weather. At the beginning this came out of the east, which made van Hoek extremely nervous that they would be cast away on the shores of Japan (they were at the latitude of Edo, which Gabriel Goto had claimed was the largest city in the world, and so it wasn’t as if the wreck of their ship would go unnoticed). But then the wind shifted around to the northwest and they were forced to put up a storm-sail and scud before it. The weather was not nearly as threatening as the waves, which were mountainous.

  It happened sometimes that when a wind shifted violently, or a ship was miserably handled, or both, the wind would blow in over the head and strike a ship’s sails directly in the face, plastering the canvas back over the rigging, and frequently slamming crew-members off of their perches. The ship would be flung into disarray. She’d go dead in the water, making her rudder quite useless, and would drift and spin like a stunned fish until she was brought in hand again. This was called being taken a-back, and it could happen to persons as well as ships. Jack had never seen van Hoek taken aback until the Dutchman emerged from belowdecks at one point to see one of those waves rolling toward them. Its crest of foam alone was large enough to swallow Minerva.

  The only way to survive seas like these was to manage rudder and a few scraps of canvas in such a way that the waves never struck the ship broadside. That was the only thing the men on Minerva thought about for the next forty-eight hours. Sometimes they stood poised on watery mountain-tops and enjoyed the view; seconds later they’d be in a trough with seemingly vertical walls of water blocking their vision fore and aft.

  After Jack had been awake for some thirty consecutive hours, he began to see things that weren’t there. For the most part this was preferable to seeing the things that were. But strangely enough—with so many natural dangers all around—the one fear that obsessed him was that they would collide with the Manila Galleon. Early in the storm he had seen a great wave coming in the corner of his eye, and phant’sied somehow that it was the Galleon riding a storm-crest; the dark bulk of the wave he took to be her hull of Philippine mahogany, the foamy crest he imagined was her sails. Of course in such a storm she wouldn’t have canvas up at all, but in this momentary dream she was a ghost-ship, already dead, and riding the storm with every inch of canvas stretched out before the wind. Of course it was really nothing more than just another damned great wave and so he forgot this apparition in the next instant.

  Every wave that came their way was a fresh challenge to their existence, as formidable as anything the Duc d’Arcachon or Queen Kottakkal had flung at them, and had to be met and survived with fresh energy and ingenuity. But they kept coming. And late in the storm, when Jack and everyone else on the ship had entirely lost their minds, and were surviving only because they were in the habit of surviving, the phant’sy of the ghost-Galleon came back and haunted him for long hours. Every wave that came towards them he saw as the underside of the Galleon’s hull, the barnacled keel coming down on them like the blade of an axe.

  He woke up lying on the deck, in the same position where he had collapsed hours before, at the end of the storm. Bright light was in his eyes but he was shivering, because it was damnably cold.

  “Thirty-seven degrees…twelve minutes,” croaked van Hoek, working nearby with a back-staff, “assuming…that I have the day right.” He paused frequently to heave great laboring sighs, as if the effort of forcing words out was almost too much for him.

  Jack—who’d been lying on his stomach—rolled onto his back. His arms had been pressed underneath him the whole time he’d been asleep, and were completely numb and dead now, like sopping rags a-dangle from his shoulders. “And what d’you suppose the day is?”

  “If that storm lasted a mere two days, I am ashamed at selling myself so cheaply. For a two-day storm should not leave a sea-captain half dead.”

  “You are half dead? I am at least three-quarters dead.”

  “Further evidence that it was more than two days. On the other hand, we could not have survived four days of that.”

  “I am not some Jesuit, bent on arguing. If you call it three days, I will agree.”

  “Then we agree that this is October the first.”

  “Any sign of the Galleon?”

  Van Hoek squinted up. “No one has the strength to go above and look. I doubt she survived. So big, and so overloaded…now I understand why they build a new one every year. Even if she survived, she’d be worn out.”

  “What do we do in that case?”

  “North,” said van Hoek. “They say that if we turn east too soon, we will make it most of the way across the Pacific, only to be becalmed, almost within sight of America, where we’ll starve to death.”

  This conversation happened at dawn. It was midday before Minerva’s topmasts could be raised again, and midafternoon before she was under way, sailing north by northeast. Every man was busy repairing the ship, and those who had no skills at carpentry or rope-work were sent down to the bilge to collect quicksilver that had trickled down there from broken flasks.

  Two days later they grazed the fortieth parallel, which put them at the same latitude as the northern extremes of Japan. Van Hoek finally consented t
o sail towards America. His intention was to hew closely to forty degrees, which (according to a bit of lore he had pried out of a drunken Spanish sea-captain in Manila) would lead eventually to Cape Mendocino. But this went the way of all intentions a day later when he discovered that some combination of winds, currents, and wandering compass-needle had driven them down almost to thirty nine degrees. He laughed at this, and that evening when they gathered in the dining cabin to saw at planks of dried beef and flick maggots out of their beans, he explained why: “Legend would have it that the Spaniards have found out some secret way across the Pacific Ocean. It is a good legend because it prevents Dutchmen, Englishmen, and other prudent Protestants from attempting the voyage. But now I know the truth, which is that they wander across, driven north and south willy-nilly, placing their lives and estates in the hands of innumerable saints. So let us drink to any saints who may be listening!”

  Thus they wandered for most of October. It turned out that the storm had done irreparable injury to the foremast, rendering it more trouble than it was worth, and so they lost a knot or two. Sometimes the wind would grow frigid and bear down out of the north, pushing them toward the latitude of thirty-five degrees, which was the lowest that van Hoek would tolerate. Then they would have to work painstakingly into the wind. The cold spray blew into the faces of the Filipino and Malay sailors like chips of flint. Van Hoek’s insistence on remaining far to the north led them to grumble. Jack did not think they were going to mutiny, but he could easily imagine circumstances in which they would. The difference in climate between thirty-five and forty degrees was considerable, and winter was making no secret of its intentions.

  They had no idea where they were. Indeed, the very notion of being somewhere lost its hold on their minds after they had gone for a month without seeing any land; if some Fellow of the Royal Society had been a-board with a newfangled instrument for measuring longitude, the figures would have meant nothing to them. Van Hoek made estimates based on their speed, and at one point announced that they had probably crossed over the meridian dividing the East from the West Hemisphere. But under close interrogation from Moseh, he admitted that it might have happened last week or that it might happen a week in the future.

  Jack saw no difference between East water and West water. They were in a part of the world that, on the Doctor’s maps, either had not appeared at all (it being considered sinful wastefulness to leave such a large expanse of fine vellum blank) or else had been covered up by some vast Barock cartouche with words printed on it in five-hundred-mile-high letters, surrounded by bare-breasted mermaids blasting away on conch-shells. Minerva had crawled underneath the legends, compass-roses, analemmas, and cartouches that were superimposed on all the world’s maps and globes, and vanished from all charts, ceased to exist. Jack had a phant’sy of some young Princess in a drawing-room staring at a map, and seeing a bit of movement under the eastern edge of some bit of engraver’s trompe l’oeil, a scrap of faux-weather-beaten scrollwork where the cartographer had writ his name. She would suppose it to be a wandering silverfish at first—then, peering at it through a magnifying lens, would resolve the outlines of a certain ship filled with mercury…

  Anyway, he was not the only man aboard seeing strange visions, for one day early in November, the lookout let out a wail of mingled fear and confusion. It was not a cheering kind of sound, coming from a lookout, and so it got the attention of every man on board.

  “He says that there is a ship in the distance—but not a ship of this world,” Dappa said.

  “What the hell does that mean?” van Hoek demanded.

  “She sails upside-down. She leaps from place to place and her form shifts, as if she were a droplet of quicksilver trapped between sea and sky.”

  Jack found this marvelously poetickal, but van Hoek was all ready with a tedious explanation: “Tell him he is only seeing a mirage. It might be another ship that lies over the horizon, or it might be a reflection of our own vessel. But there is probably not another ship within two thousand miles of us, and so it is most likely the latter.”

  But every man who was not busy with something else ascended the ratlines and got in position to view this entertainment. Jack got up sooner and higher than most. As a shareholder, he slept in a cabin instead of belowdecks, and as an Englishman he kept his windows open unless there was a positive hurricane blowing, and he had escaped the never-ending round of catarrhs, influenzas, rheumatic malfunctions, and fœbrile disorders that eddied through the crew. At any rate he had more energy and better lungs than they did and so he climbed all the way to the topmast trestletrees: high enough that he could take in Minerva’s whole length at a glance. At first the mirage was not visible, but van Hoek said that this was the common way of mirages and to be patient. So while he was being patient in the topmast trestletrees, Jack looked down at the crew, struggling up the ratlines and coughing, spitting, and scratching themselves just like the audience in a theatre, waiting for the show to begin. This was not such a bad similitude either. From the point of view of a drawing-room Princess, Minerva had vanished underneath a florid mermaid-cartouche. But from Minerva’s point of view, it was the world that had disappeared—somewhat as players do when the story pauses between acts. With their wigs, costumes, swords, and stage-props they exeunt; nothing happens for a while; the audience shifts, mutters, farts, cracks hazel-nuts, hawks up phlegm; and if it is a better class of theatre, there begins a little play-within-the-play, an entr’acte.

  “Mira!” someone shouted, and Jack looked up to see it.

  The phantom-ship appeared to be no more than a cannon-shot away from them. At times it appeared quite normal and solid. Then it would split into two symmetrical images, one right-side-up and one upside-down, or it would warp and flit about, like a drop trapped between panes of glass and being moved hither and thither by the pressure of a finger.

  But when it was solid and stable for a moment, it was obviously not Minerva but some other ship. It had men on it, and they had trimmed her sails to run before the wind, just as Minerva was doing. Several of them had climbed into her rigging to gawk and point at something.

  “Does she have any cannon run out?” van Hoek inquired.

  “It would be a strange part of the world to go a-pirating,” said Dappa.

  “Hmph!”

  “She is running up a flag,” said Moseh de la Cruz. “She must see us, as we see her!”

  Red silk bloomed in the mirage, a sudden billowing of flame. In the middle of it a gold cross and some other heraldic designs. Every man sighed at once.

  “It is the Manila Galleon!” Jack announced.

  At this news van Hoek finally bestirred himself. He climbed to the maintop and began trying to fix his spyglass on the mirage, which was like trying to spear a flea with a jack-knife. There was a certain amount of cursing in Dutch. Jack had spent enough time with van Hoek to know why: For all her bulk and shoddy construction, the Manila Galleon had not only survived; she had come through the storm in better condition than Minerva, or at least without losing any of her masts.

  After that it hailed for two straight days. One of the older sailors remarked that hail never occurred far from land. The wind came about into their teeth, and as they’d been pushed by inscrutable currents dangerously close to thirty-five degrees, they had no choice but to sail northwest for a day. When the weather cleared and the trade-wind returned, and they were able to steer towards California again, someone sighted a school of tunny fish. All agreed that tunny never ventured far from land—all except for van Hoek, who only rolled his eyes.

  The day after that they once again caught sight of the Manila Galleon in a mirage. This time—though the image was fleeting and warped—they saw a jab of flame, which probably meant that the Galleon had fired a cannon in an effort to signal them. All hands shushed each other, but if any sound reached Minerva it was drowned out by the shushing. Accordingly van Hoek refused to fire an answering signal; the Galleon, he said, might be a hundred miles away,
and there was no point in wasting gunpowder.

  That evening one far-sighted man insisted he saw a column of smoke to the southeast, which he took to be an infallible sign of land. Van Hoek said it was probably a waterspout. Still, several men loitered at that quarter of the ship, looking at it while the sun went down. Sunsets at this latitude, in November, were long and gradual, so they had plenty of time to look at this apparition, whatever it was, as the horizontal red light of dusk reflected from it.

  Eventually the sun went down, of course, though some clouds high in the eastern sky continued to reflect back a faint glow for a while afterwards.

  But there was one spot that refused to stop glowing, as if a spark of sun had flown off and gotten lodged there. It lay over the horizon, along the same bearing as the column of smoke or waterspout seen earlier. Van Hoek now revised his explanation: it was most likely an uncharted volcanic island in the middle of the Pacific. As such it might be naught more than a hot rock. On the other hand it might have streams of fresh water, and birds that could be shot and eaten. Every mouth on the ship was, in an instant, flooded with saliva. So he ordered a change in course, and had more canvas raised, since tomorrow weather might close in and make it difficult to see the volcano and easy to run aground on it.