The day had come at last, the day for the evacuation of Tangier, and he still had much to do. He took a slurp of wine, forcing it down against the bile, and then looked out at the early-morning light. The house they had requisitioned for his office was a former Portuguese merchant’s dwelling near the top of the town, affording him a view out of the wide windows similar to the panoramas that his friend Wenceslaus Hollar had etched of this place shortly after the King had taken possession of it twenty years before, and that Pepys had studied on the ship before arriving. To his left lay the great sweep of the city walls, built first by the Portuguese when they had possessed this place, and then expanded at great cost by King Charles after he had inherited the town as a dowry with his Portuguese wife Catherine of Braganza. The walls were meant to keep out both the desert and the Moors, neither very effectually, Pepys found; he was continuously afflicted by the dust in the air when the wind blew from the south, and for the past few days the Moors had reneged on their treaty and lobbed mortar shells with increasing frequency over the walls, along with burning balls of naphtha that traced great arcs in the sky and splattered fire indiscriminately across the city. To the right, and even more costly to the King, ludicrously so, was the mole in the harbor, built to keep out the winds of the Atlantic and make Tangier the greatest free port ever known, the key to trade with Africa and the East and the Indies, enriching the coffers of all who came to trade here, as well as those of the King.
And in the center was the smoldering mass of the town, a den of squalor and vice, where the lack of control from London meant that all who came here succumbed alike to the baleful miasma: administrators and officials, the soldiers of the garrison, the merchants who had flocked here to make their fortunes, drawing into their fold the worst of the low life of the Mediterranean and beyond. Pepys himself had predicted it when he had first been appointed to the Tangier Committee in 1666, but none had listened. The Civil War had been just over, the King newly reinstated, and the Age of Enlightenment had begun, in which the march of progress would sweep aside those human failings just as the prow of a mighty galleon cut through the tempestuous seas. Or so the King’s advisers had believed, those with undue faith in human nature and optimism that the Kingdom of Heaven had somehow settled on the land in all its powdered and coiffeured splendor.
He remembered another night of vomiting five months earlier on the English Channel, after he had been abruptly and without explanation summoned to join the fleet off Spithead. It was only his third sea voyage, and the wind had been up; Secretary of the Navy he might be, but seaman he most decidedly was not. He had lurched into Lord Dartmouth’s cabin, and had been given his commission with the Great Seal. He had the document pinned to his desk now, and read it again:
By order of Lord Dartmouth, Admiral of the Fleet for this expedition, and Captain-General and Governor of the city and territory of Tangier, and of all the forces there, horse and foot, the expedition is to remove from Tangier all of the inhabitants, their goods and effects, and then to destroy and demolish the city and Mole so as no pirates and enemies of the Christian faith may have any abode or retreat for the annoying these seas or coasts; to make and set fire to what forneaus, mines and other works he shall think fit for the total destruction of the city and Mole, so as to make the former uninhabitable and the latter unuseful forever.
His own remit in this dismal enterprise was precise and exacting, utterly suited to his talents and inclinations: to see a true estimate and valuation taken of every man’s property and interest in any house or tenement, in order for their reasonable satisfaction, with an assurance of the King’s protection and gracious care of them, and to arrange and pay for transport to a destination of their choosing, within or without the King’s dominions.
Secondly, he was to act as His Britannic Majesty’s emissary to the King of the Moroccans and the Moorish princes who were besieging Tangier, to negotiate terms for the Moorish takeover, including an exchange of gunpowder for the ceasefire that was currently being so flagrantly breached. His ventures outside the city walls, accompanied by only a small retinue of unarmed men, had been his first forays into true danger since wandering the streets of London during the Great Fire of 1666, a lift in excitement that he had sustained too liberally and too often in the taverns and whorehouses of the harbor.
Thirdly, and most importantly, he had been handed a sealed letter from King Charles that not even Lord Dartmouth was to see, concerning a further exchange with the Moors for an artifact of priceless significance to Christendom. His plan for the conveyance of that treasure this afternoon out of Tangier had taxed him greatly, but needed to be put from his mind this morning until his work in this office was complete and he could depart for the last time to the port.
He finished his glass and poured himself another from the decanter on his desk. He drank that down too, more robustly this time, and cautiously fed himself a few grapes from the platter beside the decanter. The tide was definitely turning, and he ate some more. He was pleased with the analogy, fitting for a navy man, though he knew no more of tides than he did of spars and deadeyes, of mainstays and flying jibs. He shut his eyes for a moment, remembering his voyage here. After all those years managing the navy from his office in the Admiralty, seeing it grow under his constant lobbying and exertions into something approaching a professional service, thinking strategically always, looking ahead, he had been astonished to come aboard and find himself, when he was not paralyzed by seasickness, mesmerized by the life of the moment, by the emotional response to being at sea, to the fact that there was little looking ahead and little looking behind, just a great and powerful living in the present. In his mind’s eye, he had begun to see ships not as part of some vast enterprise, strategically planned and imagined in squadrons and fleets on a chart, but as individual slices through time, as microcosms of the moment, just as he had seen Tangier through the windows a few moments ago, and just as he had seen London when he had exulted in it and written about it almost twenty years ago.
He looked at the large leather-bound book on the right-hand side of his desk, on top of a pile of papers from the Royal Society on all manner of subjects that he had meant to catch up on while he was here, but had never quite managed to find the time. The book was John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, subtitled: from This World to That Which is To Come, Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream, given to him by Bunyan himself in gratitude for Pepys’s help in getting it published. He had left it marked where he had been reading it the previous evening, before the lure of the tavern had proved irresistible, at the point where the narrator finished his journey from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City.
Pepys had ordered the book sent on to him in Tangier because it gave him some semblance of hope; not that Tangier itself would ever be resurrected, nor that there was a heavenly Celestial City to anticipate, but that there might somewhere on earth be a place where the vice and temptation that pulled men down from happiness might be expunged, and life reduced to its essentials. In his youth, even in those heady days in London, he had dreamed sometimes of joining the pilgrims on their quest to America, leaving the Old World behind in all its debauchery and starting afresh, seeking purity and light. Those feelings, at any rate, were ones he had when he was sober; the devil was in him when he had taken too much drink, and seen the flashes of lace and peachy skin that drew him back to those places of temptation again and again.
He looked at the unfinished page of his diary, stained now with a splatter of wine, and then at the hourglass on the other side of his desk, still more than half full. He could do it, after all; he had time. His mind was suddenly tumbling with ideas and images, of the fabled artifact that would soon be within his grasp, of The Pilgrim’s Progress and the Celestial City, of being at sea, of seeing the myriad types and motivations among the applicants to his office for remuneration, of the meaning of that too. He took up his pen and stroked more lines through his previous entry, and then began to write feverishly, r
echarging his pen every few seconds and spilling droplets of ink on the paper, not caring:
Artifacts, methinks, as with all human creations, like books and music and art, extend the span of our own compass, just as the navigator stretches his instrument over the chart to reach beyond the horizon. Artifacts are details of history, without which we tell stories that are utterly corruptible; knowing those details so intimately is no different from our everyday lives, filled as they are with our own artifacts, and artifacts thus serve to bring history before us. Acquisitiveness is in our nature, the need to find and take possessions, and present our discoveries to the world. Yet the artifacts with the greatest meaning are sometimes the most dangerous, and are best kept hidden until men learn to expel cruelty and venality and vice …
Nearly an hour later, Pepys stopped writing and turned his mind to the business of the morning. The most pressing last-minute concern for the Admiralty administration in Tangier, which meant him, was how to find officers to command the numerous transport ships that had been commissioned into the King’s service to take people and goods back to England, and to the numerous other destinations required. The problem was less of an issue for the requisitioned merchantmen, as they still for the most part had their masters and crews aboard, but it was acute for the many prizes captured by Royal Navy ships from the Barbary corsairs; most of those were previously merchantmen, whose crews had been murdered or sold into slavery and the pirate crews killed in the encounter or later executed. Those ships being essential for the transport arrangements, it had been necessary to winnow men from the Royal Navy squadron at Tangier to provide additional skeleton crews, and to promote lieutenants, midshipmen, and even master’s mates to temporary commands.
As the transport ships were now Royal Navy vessels, it was legally obligatory that their captains hold a King’s commission, a ruling that Pepys himself had engineered several years before but that was now sorely tested by the lack of available manpower. There were no longer any officers to be spared among the squadron, with several of the captains openly professing rebellion should they be requested to weaken their fighting ability still further. For the two transport vessels that remained without captains, only one possible candidate from the squadron had been put forward, an officer who had been suspended under threat of court martial, and for the second of the vessels Pepys had been obliged to search among the supply officers of the port for those who held a King’s commission, seeking so far without success one who had some measure of sea service before taking employment on land.
He had gone to see the two ships yesterday, both of them fluyts of Dutch origin, economically built from oak and pine, of three hundred and fifty to four hundred tons burden, their wide, deep-bellied holds well suited to carry the armaments and other goods that had been progressively stacked up along the wharf-side over the past few weeks. One of them, the Schiedam, captured by Captain Shovel from pirates off Spain, had the more pear-shaped profile of the two, wide enough to carry two rows of cannon barrels laid side by side in her hull; he had watched the great guns from the city walls being laden into her, culverins and demi-culverins and falconets, as well as mortars, wall guns, boxes of muskets, cannonballs, and small barrels filled with grenades and musket and pistol shot, with space being left in the hull for horses and the workmen and their families who had also been allocated to the Schiedam.
The other ship, called the Black Swan after her distinctive figurehead, was the one he had earmarked for his secret mission; he knew enough of naval architecture to see that she would be the better sailor, so that whereas the slower Schiedam would need convoy protection by the Squadron for her voyage to England, the Black Swan would be able to chance it alone on her much longer voyage to the Caribbean, where she might need to outrun Spanish privateers as well as pirates. For that reason he had also ordered her armament boosted, so that instead of the paltry four-pounders usually carried by fluyts, she had six eight-pounders to each side, as well as a considerable supply of small arms. As far as anyone else knew, she was being armed in preparation for carrying those merchants of Tangier who wished for passage to the Caribbean and the New World, so there had been no need for him to reveal to anyone his true intentions for the ship. He needed the better captain for her as well, something he sorely hoped would resolve itself to his satisfaction after this morning’s interviews.
The door opened, and his assistant Booth came in, carrying a handful of rolled plans and wearing his usual dapper clothes, looking more like a preacher destined for the New World than a junior official of His Majesty’s Board of the Admiralty. “Good morning to you, sir. A fine day for the evacuation.”
Pepys remembered that he still had his earplugs in, and took them out. Another fireball slammed into a street not far away, causing his glass to shake and the wine to slop onto his papers. He caught it just as it was about to topple over, and grunted, nodding curtly. Booth looked at him and then at the decanter, rather shrewishly, Pepys thought; he knew exactly what the other man was thinking. Booth was of overtly puritanical tendencies, a Cromwellian during the late war who had paid the price by never rising above his present lowly clerical rank within the Admiralty, though the more Pepys knew him, the more admirably he felt that he suited precisely that position. In small, sometimes not easily definable ways, he found Booth almost constantly irritating, and yet there was no question that he was an indispensable assistant. He was privy to so many sensitive affairs of the navy and the state that he was not a man who could sensibly be shunted aside; his and Pepys’s lives were inextricably intertwined for the duration. Pepys knew this, he knew intellectually that he needed to accept Booth entirely into his confidence, and yet the sight of the man first thing on a fractious morning made his blood rise slightly and his stomach tighten.
He drained what was left of the wine in the glass and put it down with unnecessary force. “What of this morning’s business?”
Booth came up to the desk, passed over two documents and took the wine glass and decanter away, placing them out of reach on a table beneath one of the windows. “The two officers remaining to be interviewed for commands, sir. These are their records.”
“Are they here?”
“They are waiting downstairs.”
“Well fetch them then.”
Booth left, and Pepys rose and retrieved the decanter, with two glasses this time, placing them on his desk just as a knock came on the door, Booth’s always annoying rat-a-tat. “All right,” Pepys bellowed irritably. “I can hear you. Enter.”
The door opened and Booth ushered in a small, unremarkable-looking man wearing the blue uniform of an officer of the navy but without epaulettes.
“You are Mr. Fish, I presume?” Pepys said, peering at the man and then at a document in front of him. “Lord Dartmouth’s Controller of Naval Stores for Tangier?”
“Yes indeed, sir, if you please,” Fish said, bowing a little too ingratiatingly, Pepys thought. “I am accorded the rank equivalent of a lieutenant in the service, sir.”
“I can see that,” Pepys said, scanning the paper. “The rank equivalent maybe, but neither the qualification, nor, I apprehend, the experience required for an officer’s berth on a ship.” He peered at the man. “Have you ever been to sea in any nautical capacity, Mr. Fish?”
“Like you, sir, if I may suggest the comparison, I carry out a job of great value to the welfare and functioning of His Majesty’s Navy, but that employment requires, indeed obliges, me to remain with my feet firmly planted on the ground, except as required for passage between ports.”
“Firmly planted on the ground,” Pepys repeated scornfully, tossing the paper down and sighing. “Unlike you, I do not wear the King’s uniform, nor do I hold a commission, and it remains my heartfelt contention, presented to the Admiralty Board on many an occasion to much and continual frustration, that all who do so, regardless of where their feet are planted or the unquestioned importance of their employment, should have served a term under canvas as a seaman or midshi
pman, so as to display the minimum level of competence required should they be called upon as a commissioned officer, in precisely such an emergency as this, to exercise command of one of His Majesty’s ships.” Pepys had felt his blood rise as he spoke, and he reached over and poured himself another glass, draining half of it and glaring at Fish. “What say you to this?”
“Indeed, sir.” Fish looked flabbergasted, and a little crestfallen. “Am I to be censured?”
“No, of course not,” Pepys replied, sighing again. “Your job here is vital, and perforce you are carrying it out to the best of your abilities. There is much for you to do still in the docks, and little time. You may go.”
Fish bowed slightly, looking confused, replaced his hat, touched his fingers to it, and hurried out of the door, closing it behind him. Booth, who had remained in the room for the interview, came hesitantly forward. “Dare I say it, sir, that you were a little harsh on the poor man?”
“He is wholly inadequate to the task of commanding a ship, and weak of personality, I feel. He may be good at organizing navvies on the docks, but he will go to pieces if anything veers wayward at sea. And I am the one who will shoulder the blame, for I cannot allow it to fall on my Lord Dartmouth, or indeed His Majesty the King.”
“He is for the Schiedam, then?”
Pepys grunted. “Who is the next one?”
“By the name of Henry Avery, from Plymouth, aged twenty-five years, acting master’s mate on board the James Galley.”
“Ah yes. Captain Shovel’s henchman. Well, at least he is a seaman, unlike our previous offering. Is he waiting downstairs? Go and fetch him too, if you please.”
Pepys poured himself another glass of wine and sifted through the papers on his table, finding the document he wanted and quickly reading it as he drank. It was the action report by Cloudesley Shovel on the capture of the Schiedam from Barbary pirates off Cape Trafalgar in Spain two months ago, the event that had led to the ship being brought to Tangier and commissioned into the Royal Navy as a transport. Henry Avery, junior master’s mate, had distinguished himself in the fray, not so much for his leadership as for a burst of single-minded ferocity that had seen not only most of the pirates butchered by his hand but also several of the innocent Dutch seamen captured by the pirates who happened to get in his way. The incident had been hushed up and the report had not gone beyond Pepys’s desk, but it had given Avery an elevated status among the crew, respected by some and feared by others.
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