The System of the World: Volume Three of the Baroque Cycle

by Neal Stephenson

  The transfer to the sloop went quickly, as Johann had hoped. The anchor was taken up and sails raised to catch what feeble breeze there was. Thus began a strange night-journey down the river, which to Caroline was a continuation of the longboat-passage, with everything spread out on a larger field: for queues of bonfires continued to grow across the countryside, radiating outwards from the city, and not a minute went by that her ears did not collect the faint report of galloping hooves on the post-road. In the end she only lulled herself to sleep by telling herself that this sloop, gliding silently down the dark river bearing a mysterious passenger, must be as sinister and disturbing to the riders on those horses, and the watchers on the hilltops, as they were to her; and perhaps with good reason, since (as she still had to remind herself) she intended to rule the country some day.

  Sophia, Mouth of the Thames

  MORNING OF THURSDAY, 29 JULY 1714

  HANOVER WAS LANDLOCKED. Its greatest body of water was a three-mile-wide puddle. The rich might invest in, the rash might sail on, proper ships; but they had to travel abroad to Bremerhaven first. For most Hanoverians, the preferred way of getting to the other side of a body of water was to wait for it to freeze, then sprint across. Sophia, the sloop that Caroline and Johann had boarded in the dead of night off the Isle of Dogs, was technically a Hanoverian vessel, in that she carried impressive-looking documents asserting that she was. But the crew consisted mostly of boys from Friesland, the skipper was an Antwerp Protestant named Ursel, and the lads who had muscled the oars of the longboat last night had been hired, along with the boat, from a Danish whaler that was having her hull scraped in Rotherhithe. Those Danes were now waking up with sore backs in East London. Much water, some fresh and some brackish, had passed beneath Sophia’s keel in the meantime.

  Left to form her own opinions, Caroline might have judged that they were now out in the sea, and well on their way to Antwerp. The fog made it impossible to see more than a stone’s throw in any direction, but Sophia was being shouldered from one brawny roller to the next like a child being passed around by a crowd at a hanging. The temperature had dropped (which, as the Natural Philosopher in her knew, must account for the fog), and the air smelled different. But that this was pure landlubberly foolishness could be known by watching Ursel, who was no happier, here and now, than a Hanoverian, half-way across the Steinhuder Meer, when the ice he is treading on begins to crack and tilt. “This is why no one does this,” he said to Johann, in a pidgin halfway between Dutch and German.

  The second this, taken in the context of all that had happened in the last several hours, probably meant “to sneak out of the Pool in the middle of the night so that the Customs officials at Gravesend shall not board the vessel, inspect her cargo, and receive their customary gratuity, and then to run down the Hope, navigating by sounding-lead, in hopes of squirting past the fort at Sheerness before dawn so as not to be blown out of the water by the coastal artillery situated there for that purpose or overhauled by naval vessels sent out to run down smugglers.” All of which looked to have been accomplished, to landlubberly eyes. A huge bell had bonged nine times, not long ago, and one of the mates, who knew the Thames, had identified it as the Cathedral in Canterbury. To Caroline, who had studied maps, this suggested they were well clear of the river’s channel.

  It was less clear what Ursel had meant by the first this. It was something so bad as to render self-evident the folly of having attempted the second this. Caroline looked at Johann. He was even more exhausted than she (for Caroline had slept and he had not), and more sea-sick to boot. It was clear from the look on his face that he did not know anything more than she did about the nature of the first this. And so Caroline stopped looking to him for answers, and watched the Frieslanders. They were very busy with sounding-leads, on port and starboard; one would think, to watch them, that Sophia was under assault by swimming pirates with daggers clenched in their teeth, and her only weapons were these slugs of lead on the ends of ropes. She had seen this procedure done before. Usually it took a good deal longer, as the lead took some time to strike bottom, and the rope had to be drawn back up one double arm-length, or fathom, at a time. These chaps were tossing their leads several times a minute, and calling out fathom-soundings without even bothering to draw in the lines. The numbers sounded funny in the dialect of Friesland; but they were small numbers.

  She worked her way round the poop-deck rail toward Johann. “They all began to get terribly excited when the cock crowed.”

  “I heard no cock crow,” answered Johann.

  “Because you were crowing at the same moment.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Vomiting,” she explained. “But a cock did crow, distinctly, over there.” She waved vaguely to starboard.

  Johann managed a confident smile. “Do not worry. Sounds carry strangely in fog. It could have been miles away. Or perhaps it was aboard another ship.”

  A cow mooed.

  “The cock-crow could have a second meaning as well,” Caroline pointed out, “no less troubling than the first: namely, that the fog is lifting.” She had to raise her voice and lean closer to Johann, because Ursel had begun screaming. Like expert flautists, who could use the trick of circular breathing to play long continuous notes, Ursel had the ability, oft seen among sergeants, schoolteachers, wives, and other leaders of men, to scream for several minutes without letting up to replenish his lungs. “He has had an epiphany,” Caroline said. “For quite a while, we wandered lost in the fog. Now, suddenly, he knows where we are.”

  “Yes,” said Johann, “the wrong place.” Which was so obvious that it was bad form for him to have mentioned it. For the issue of all Ursel’s shouting, and the exertions of the sailors, was that Sophia came about, and, after a pause to carve her initials in the mushy bottom-sand with her keel, began to make head-way along a new course. In a few minutes’ time, the soundings began to aspire past five, nay, even six fathoms. Of livestock the calls became less distinct, and the smell was replaced by that of creatures with fins and shells. The sky brightened from gray, to silver, to gold, and Caroline began to sense its warmth, faintly, on her lips, as she sensed Johann’s body heat on cold nights in her bedchamber. Finally they emerged from the fog altogether. A shadowy blot off their port beam resolved itself into a Royal Navy brig parallelling them, and going about the task of opening up her gunports.

  “At other moments during the execution of the present Plan I have had occasion to question whether it had been well-wrought; and yet troubles resolved, and we got this far,” Johann said. “I shall pray to God and trust in Providence that this is not as bad as it would plainly seem on its face.” His face was red: in some circumstances, adorable, here not a good sign.

  “Poor Jean-Jacques. As out of place here as a rooster.”

  “If we could have galloped to Hanover, I would have so arranged it,” he admitted. “But it is not for you to show concern for me in this pass.”

  “If we are overhauled, I shall put on the black sash that says I am in this country incognito,” Caroline said. “Somewhere on yonder brig must be an officer, a man of breeding, who shall know what it means.”

  “The incognito worked for Sophie when she would go to visit Liselotte in the halcyon days of Versailles,” Johann brooded, “but to expect Tories and Whigs to observe such a quaint conceit, in present circumstances, is like asking two gamecocks to toast the Queen’s health before they commence slashing. No, I think I shall have to take responsibility, if it comes to that.”

  “What does that mean? You shall claim that you kidnapped me and brought me to London against my will?”

  “Something like that.”

  “It is foolish. I will simply deny that I am who I am.”

  The discussion went on thus, tediously, circularly, and without result, even as the skipper Ursel was carrying on a parallel exchange with the captain of the Royal Navy brig. By signal-flags, the brig ordered Sophia to allow herself to be overhauled. Sophia affect
ed not to see, then, not to understand, the message; the brig stiffened it with a cannon-shot across Sophia’s bow. Sophia, which by now had maneuvered into broader and deeper waters off Foulness Sand, raised sail, and began to make run for it by sailing closer to the wind than the square-rigged brig was capable of. This got them several miles nearer the open sea, for the wind was generally out of the east, which was the direction they wanted to go. They zigzagged, sometimes sailing a few points north, sometimes a few points south, of due east. The brig did likewise, but had to take wider and more pronounced zigzags, which ought to have made it slower. So it looked favorable for Sophia, at least by this simple account. But as the morning wore on, it became evident to Caroline (who was observing closely, as she looked forward to inheriting a Navy) that this was very much a devil-in-the-details sort of matter. The brig was capable of moving through the water faster than Sophia, so the difference in net speed was not quite as great as all that. And the brig had a proper pilot aboard, who knew where the shifting sands at the mouth of the river were today. Whereas Ursel had to work from a chart that had been printed ten years ago and was now a palimpsest of confusing hand-drawn cross-hatchings, and angry and emphatic notes in diverse Northern European languages. On account of which Sophia’s actual course, far from being the stately zigzag she would have traced across deep blue water, was a jangled fibrillation about due east, careering to one side or another whenever Ursel phant’sied they were approaching some peril rumored on the chart, or when the trend of the soundings was inauspicious, or the color of the water or the texture of its surface did not please him. Much time was spent, and much of Sophia’s forward momentum pissed away, in frequent course-changes, even as the brig loped easily back and forth across the estuary, plotting each tack to pierce invisible gaps between the Middle, the Warp, the Mouse, the Spile, the Spaniard, the Shivering Sand, and other Hazards to Navigation too small or too ephemeral to waste names on. It was altogether tense, chancy, and perilous, and so ought to have been thrilling. Yet it stretched out over half the day, and as much as an hour would sometimes go by without anything in particular happening. It was a bit like sitting by the bedside of a loved one with a grave illness: momentous, all-consuming, yet boring, hence exhausting.

  In the end exhaustion caught up with Ursel. Or perhaps he had simply been outmaneuvered by the brig, which late in the morning began to draw within firing range of Sophia, and seemed as if she might be trying to get into position to fire a broadside. Forced suddenly to choose between cannon-fire and shallow water, Ursel chose the latter, and promptly ran Sophia aground on a ridge of ooze that in retrospect was implied by a squiggle on the chart. They were between Foreness and Foulness, in a place where the way was above twenty miles wide, and a river only in name; the entire eastern half of the horizon consisted of ocean, a full one hundred and eighty degrees of mockery to the poor skipper. When Caroline asked Ursel what they ought to do next, Ursel informed her that he was not competent to offer an opinion, for he was a skipper of ships, and Sophia was no longer that, but a wrack, owned not by Hanover but by whomever first happened along to salvage it. Then he retreated to his cabin to drink gin.

  “Well, I know nothing of Admiralty law,” said Caroline, “but this looks more ocean than river to me. I say we are on the high seas, minding our own business.”

  “We are aground,” Johann insisted.

  “Then we were on the high seas minding our own business,” Caroline said, “when along came that nasty brig and forced us to run aground. It is an act of piracy.”

  Johann rolled his eyes.

  “We were on a pleasure cruise out of Antwerp when it happened,” Caroline went on.

  “What, and just happened to cross the North Sea by accident?”

  “Blown off course in the night by that unusual easterly wind. Happens all the time. Come, don’t be difficult! Last night in London you said I must do deeds beyond your scope. Re-writing history is a royal prerogative, is it not?”

  “So ’twould seem, if you read much history.”

  “Who do you phant’sy is the more inventive writer: Queen Anne, or the woman before you?”

  “That laurel goes to you, my love.”

  “Very well. In a trunk belowdecks is a Hanoverian flag. Run it up the mast. Let us show our colors, that all ships passing by may plainly see what rank piracy is committed this day by the Royal Navy!” And she struck a royal enough pose in the bows, gesturing with an arm to the waters spread out before them, which were flecked with sails of great ships.

  “If it pleases your royal highness,” Johann said.

  “It does. Hop to it.”

  In response to Sophia’s having run aground, the brig had to conduct certain maneuvers that occupied close to half an hour: viz. breaking off her tack, coming about, reducing sail, and making slow head-way to a point in deeper water some half a mile distant where she could tarry long enough to deploy a longboat without having to worry that wind, current, or tide would drive her aground. By the time all of these things had been achieved, Sophia had run a large set of Hanoverian colors to the top of her otherwise bare mast. And this seemed to give the brig’s skipper second thoughts. For the arms of the House of Hanover were so close to those of the royal family of Great Britain as to be indistinguishable from this distance. The brig might be menacing Sophia with open gunports and run-out cannons; but Princess Caroline had just pressed a loaded pistol to the forehead of the brig’s skipper.

  Last night, perhaps, some messenger, despatched from London by Bolingbroke, had galloped into the fort at Sheerness and presented this captain with an order to scour the estuary for such-and-such a sloop, and to capture the foreign spies aboard it. Which might have sounded straightforward enough at the time. Bolingbroke’s seal dangling from the document, the exhausted post-horse blowing outside, the spattered and red-eyed messenger, the urgent missive in the dead of night: just the sort of thing ambitious naval officers prayed for. He had done his duty well this morning. But now something had gone awry: he had been presented with an opportunity to think. The royal arms rippling from the mast-head of the grounded sloop gave him much to think about, and much incentive to think carefully.

  The brig’s longboat was lowered, but not manned. Then it was supplied with oarsmen; but there seemed to be a debate in progress on the poop deck as to which officers should venture out. Was this a boarding-party? A rescue mission? A diplomatic envoy? Were the passengers on the sloop foreign spies, fleeing smugglers, or the future owners and admirals of the Royal Navy? It was not the sort of situation that lent itself to speedy resolves.

  And it only grew more complicated. For immediately after Sophia had shown her true colors, one of the great ships passing from the ocean into the Thames had altered her course, and had been growing ever since: a tiered battlement of white canvas spreading wider and looming higher by the minute. This thing was to the brig as a bear to a bulldog. She had three masts to the brig’s two, and more courses on each mast, and more deck to carry cargo or guns—but mostly guns, for she was (as rapidly became obvious) an East Indiaman, hence not really distinguishable from a warship. She had at least thrice the brig’s displacement. Farther up the Thames, her size would have put her at a disadvantage, but there was adequate room to maneuver here, at least, provided one had accurate charts and knew how to use them. This East Indiaman seemed every bit as confident as the brig in steering around unseen shallows. This despite the fact that she was not an English ship at all, nor a Dutch, but—as became clear, when she finally ran out her colors—

  “Mirabile dictu,” said Johann, who had two-fistedly jammed a prospective-glass into his eye-socket. “What are the odds that two Hanoverian ships should meet?”

  “What are the odds that there would exist two Hanoverian ships?” Caroline returned. She wrested the glass from Johann, and spent a minute admiring the Indiaman’s figurehead: a bare-breasted Pallas, poised to bash her way through seas with her snaky-headed Ægis.

  “My mother invested in
a ship once,” Johann said, “or rather Sophie did, and Mother handled the numbers.”

  “Let me try to guess the name of that ship. Athena? Pallas? Minerva?”

  “That was it. Minerva. I thought she was in Boston, though.”

  “Maybe she was,” said Caroline. “But now she’s here.”

  Orney’s Ship-yard, Rotherhithe

  31 JULY 1714

  “SHE IS A FAIR ENOUGH young lady, composed, civil, even when being man-handled off a sandbar by a boat-load of Filipino and Laskar swabbies. But, I was greatly relieved to get her off of my ship.”

  Otto van Hoek had the skin and the disposition of a hundred-year-old man, and the vigor of one closer to thirty. He had a steel hook in place of his right hand, and when he was distracted or nervous he would paw at things with it. Taverns, chambers, and cabins habituated by van Hoek sported sheaves of scratches on tabletops and walls, as if a giant cat had been there sharpening its claws. Now he was scoring the lid of a packing-crate lately off-loaded from Minerva. It rested on the wharf of Mr. Orney’s Ship-yard in Rotherhithe. The address read

  DR. DAN’L WATERHOUSE

  COURT OF TECHNOLOGICKAL ARTS

  CLERKENWELL

  LONDON

  The planks of the lid were already scored half through, for van Hoek kept his hook sharp, and it had been a long and anxious morning for him. Minerva was in the dry-dock: a ditch slotted out of the bank of the river and walled off from it by doors wrought of whole tree-trunks. These, though they creaked alarmingly, and leaked copiously, held back the River. Minerva was propped up on many timbers rammed into the dry-dock’s mucky and puddle-pocked floor. Her hull put Daniel in mind of a potato that has been left too long in the cellar and sprouted many tendrils, for one could phant’sy that the ship had thrust out a hundred bony legs below the water-line and crawled up out of the river. He had supposed that putting a ship as large as Minerva in dry-dock must be a stupendous operation extending over weeks, and had hoped that he’d arrive in time to see its opening phases. But it had been over and done with when he’d walked into the yard at eleven o’clock in the morning, and the only record of the adventure was a hundred parallel hook-scratches in the lid of this crate.