by J. D. Davies
By the third day, we were well established in our new empire, although not contentedly so. The soldiers who had been so happy to spill ashore onto Charles Island were already complaining of its inadequacies, grumbling of its indefensibility, lack of protection from the heat and inevitable fevers to come; one soldier was already sick, and both redcoats and sailors alike were muttering that this was an evil portent indeed. We also contemplated the possibility of attack, but thus far, the land seemed benign enough. We could spy native canoes close in to both shores, but they stayed well clear of us. Further off, on the north shore of the Gambia, a few fishermen could be seen, all perfectly black in their skin, but no more organised society than that. Holmes sent a boat to the mainland; after all, he was the authority on these parts, the one man (with the debatable exception of O'Dwyer) who had been to this dreadful place before. That evening, after his boat had returned and the climate had become barely tolerable, Holmes called a meeting in his great cabin. I went across with O'Dwyer, William Castle, Kit Farrell, Valentine Negus and Francis Gale, whose sighting of natives on the shore had convinced him that here was an entire continent crying out for the true word of God, in the shape of the Church of England By Law Established and its envoy, the Rector of Ravensden. Morgan Facey, the putative governor of Charles Island, joined us. As we entered the cabin, we were all, I think, a little startled to see at Holmes' side an ancient one-legged man, propped up on crutches. How this creature had yet warded off death was a mystery: he wheezed with every breath, and a great indentation in the side of his head suggested his skull had been shattered long ago.
'Your pilot, Captain Quinton,' Holmes said. 'Despite appearances, he's the best on the river. Isn't that so, Jesus?'
Holmes pronounced the name in our English way, which unsettled me a not a little. Judging by Francis Gale's expression, it affected him even more profoundly; presumably not even the finest theological training that the University of Cambridge provided could prepare a man for the revelation that the Second Coming was a crippled old Portugee eking out a living on the Gambia River.
'Hay-zuzz,' said the old man with surprising vehemence. 'Hay-zuzz, Captain Holmes, as I told you and your Prince Rupert ten years ago.' The Second Coming's English was remarkably fluent. 'Hay-zuzz Sebastian Belem at your service, Captain Quinton.'
I have travelled more widely since those days of my extreme and naive youth, and have long since ceased to bat an eyelid when encountering Latins called Jesus or Maria; or Frenchmen called Anne, come to that.
'Hay-zuzz, then,' said Holmes, with evident bad grace. 'He has just returned from a voyage up the coast. Before we begin our conference proper, tell Captain Quinton the intelligence you gleaned upon that voyage, Hay-zuzz.'
The old Portugee ignored the sarcasm. 'A Dutch frigate has arrived at Cape Verde. Not as large as your Jersey, but they say she is the precursor of a stronger force to come.'
'So,' said Holmes, 'I have no time to lose, I think.' I, not we. 'Time for us to separate, Matthew. I will sail for Cape Verde on tomorrow's tide, God and the wind permitting. I'll take Gorée and then move down the coast, taking and sinking as I go.' The glint in his eye told its own story: nothing was bound to give Robert Holmes greater delight than the prospect of waging his own private war. 'You will continue your mission up river, in quest of Colonel O'Dwyer's mountain of gold, with Belem here as your pilot and guide. This plan meets your approval, Captain?'
It mattered little if it did not, I suspected. Holmes had plainly made up his mind, his orders did not contradict the king's original instructions, and I could hardly argue with my superior officer. 'As you say, Captain Holmes.'
'So, then,' said Holmes. 'The time has come, I think, for Colonel O'Dwyer to lay before us the exact route he proposes to follow to the mountain in question.'
A chart of the Gambia river—presumably Belem's—was laid out on the table in front of Holmes and the ancient pilot. My heart sank as I followed the river upstream from our location. Place names became fewer; the detail of hills, tributaries and the like became noticeably vaguer, leaving nearly the whole of the right-hand quarter of the chart almost entirely blank. As was the custom with the charts of those days, the indigenous animals had been added here and there to enliven matters
(for in truth, there is nothing duller than a bare chart). I had expected to see the crocodiles, elephants and lions that had been drawn on either side of the lower and middle reaches of the Gambia, but I was somewhat discomforted by the fact that the chart-maker had seen fit to illustrate the upper reaches with unicorns.
If O'Dwyer was alarmed at being forced to reveal his hand, he did not show it. He stepped forward to the chart table with his usual swagger, looked down upon it, frowned, and then pointed to a spot not far away from the unicorn in the top right hand corner.
'There,' he said with some vehemence. 'A month's march, I'd say, north-east from the Hill of Tinda.'
I peered down at the chart. The Hill of Tinda was almost the last name on the right hand side, before the great blankness began and well to the right of some of the other unicorns. I looked up at my officers. Castle's face was a mask; he was too much the veteran to betray his feelings. By contrast, Kit Farrell's round young face could never conceal the feelings behind it, and he was clearly excited by the prospect of this voyage of discovery into unknown, or barely known, territory. Francis Gale seemed lost in prayerful contemplation; this was always a sign that he was requesting a divine thunderbolt to strike down someone who offended him. The dour veteran Morgan Facey was shaking his head, albeit almost imperceptibly. No doubt he was calculating the effect of a month's march each way, in these conditions, on soldiers with muskets and heavy knapsacks.
But I was captain of the Seraph, Holmes was effectively resigning command of this part of the expedition to me (as the king had intended all along), and I knew there would be no other opportunity to nip this madness in the bud. And I thought that my means of doing so stood there before me. On crutches.
So I asked Belem the question that had burned inside me since I first encountered Brian Doyle O'Dwyer in the captain's cabin of the Wessex. 'Tell me, Belem. You have served as a pilot on this river for—what?—forty years or more?' The old man nodded. 'Then if you know it so well, you of all men will know if a great mountain of gold really does lie beyond it, in the lands beyond the headwaters.'
Holmes smirked, but said nothing. I caught an exchange of glances between Francis Gale and Kit Farrell. Morgan Facey's eyes narrowed. O'Dwyer looked intently at the old man. The tension in the great cabin of the Jersey was palpable.
The cripple looked about him, and down at the chart. At length, he said, 'Well, Captain. Myself, I've never been beyond Barraconda, there.' He pointed to a place well to the left of the Hill of Tinda, just by the first of the unicorns. 'Trading hardly ever goes on above Pompeton, here.' Almost half way across the chart in our direction, this; safely into the land of lions, elephants and place names. 'But I'm told that caravans of Moors sometimes come across the desert to those parts, from the lands far to the north. I've even encountered Arabs as far down the river as Kasang and Wolley Wolley. And there's always been much talk of gold mines, far beyond Barraconda. The natives of those parts wear even more gold than those hereabouts. It must come from somewhere.'
This was not the answer I had expected. O'Dwyer favoured me with a triumphant smirk. My officers shuffled in embarrassment for their captain. Only Holmes seemed entirely at ease with Belem's surprising speech.
'Well, then, that being so, how long do you estimate it will take to reach the location provided by Colonel O'Dwyer?'
Belem looked down at the chart and pointed his wizened finger at our location, right in the mouth of the Gambia, at the extreme left-hand side of the chart.
'From this anchorage to Tindobauge, good sailing, wide channel, so three days at most, probably less with the winds as they are and the times when you should get the flood tides. From Tindobauge, here, past Elephant Island, to Kasang, her
e—ten days. Beyond Kasang, the river becomes more difficult. It is tidal no more, so you are going against the current. It twists this way, then that—difficult waters for a ship this large, Captain, especially now in the dry season, when the chief wind is that which the Arabs call Harmattan, from the north-east. These upper reaches would be easier if you were navigating them in the deeper water and west winds of the wet months,' said Belem, 'but they will not begin until May, and of course that wet season brings the man-killing fevers, as you may find on your return. Better, perhaps, to leave your ship at Kasang, or even downstream of that, build boats there, and proceed in them. So, two weeks to build your boats, then on, beyond what you English call Arse Hill - '
I thought I must have misheard, but the glint in Holmes' eye told me I had not. 'Just what it says, Matt,' he said. 'A hill shaped like a great arse - a pair of buttocks. The custom of the river demands that crews bare their own arses at it as they pass.'
'Just so,' said Belem. 'From Kasang to Barraconda—three or four weeks. Beyond Barraconda, the stream becomes more difficult still—rapids, shoals, whirlpools and the like, as those who have been in those waters have told me. So from Barraconda to the hill of Tinda, where Colonel O'Dwyer intends to begin his march—perhaps three weeks more.'
I did the fearful arithmetic in my head. Three months or more to reach the mountain—if it truly existed, and I trusted the word of this ancient Portugee about as much as I trusted that of Brian Doyle O'Dwyer. But if it did exist—dear God, I was becoming as fanciful as my king—if it did, then Heaven alone knew how long at the mountain itself, mapping it, recording it, preparing the way for the Welsh and Yorkshire miners whom the king would despatch to supplement the slaves we would buy in these parts—say three months, perhaps? At least the same amount of time to cross the desert again and navigate back downstream, so another three months or so (and that made no allowance for the rainy season, its storms and its fevers). How long then to fit and victual for a voyage to England? Three months more, say. and the voyage itself, another two ... thus even by a conservative estimate I could not hope to see England's shore, nor my love Cornelia, for well over a year. Our Lord alone knew how things would stand by then between my brother, my mother and the Countess Louise; or, indeed, whether Tris and his agents would have unearthed something so dreadful about the latter and her vanished daughter that the House of Quinton would shake to its very foundations. Perhaps even worse, I might miss the whole of the Dutch war that Holmes was minded to bring about—all that prize money, all that honour from playing my part in the final destruction of Holland, that nest of perfidious, avaricious butterboxes (my wife excepted). Of course, all of my calculations assumed that Captain Matthew Quinton actually managed to survive the perils of the river, the storms, the fevers, the desert, the lions, and being gored by a unicorn.
For the first time in my life, I felt a sudden urge to draw my sword, press its point to my heart, and ram it home.
Eighteen
I watched from the quarterdeck of Seraph the following morning as the sails were loosed aboard Jersey and her prize, the Brill. We saluted Holmes with eleven guns; he answered nine; I returned seven; he answered five; and at the last, I returned three. My crew, gathered upon the deck, gave three lusty huzzahs, though in truth, most of them were green with envy as the sails of the Jersey and Brill sank below the horizon to the west. Almost to a man, they would rather have been going to sea with Holmes, out into a fresher climate and with Dutch prizes in their sights, than heading up this fetid river on a quest of the utmost folly, born of the avarice of a king. Kit warned that some of the more refractory lads from London and Bristol were full of this talk, and that there were murmurs of them taking over the ship and sailing her as a pirate. These practical concerns brought my own thoughts out of that dismal place whither they had fled. As agreed with Holmes and the others in the latter half of the previous evening's conference aboard Jersey, the Prospect of Blakeney would be left behind at Charles Island when Seraph proceeded upstream. Some of the spare cannon that Jersey had brought with her were put into Prospect, thus giving her a battery of eight guns—strong enough to deal with almost anything that was likely to come that way, other than a proper ship of war—but as Holmes would need all of his own men to provide prize crews (the man's confidence was unbounded), it had been decided that the enlarged crew for Prospect would be drawn exclusively from Seraph. Kit and I went through the muster book, carefully picking out a combination of the foulest coxcombs and good, dependable men (not all from my old Cornish following; even London and Bristol can produce sound men occasionally). To command over them we sent Grimwade, the best of the master's mates, and Pegg, the boatswain's mate who had conducted the flogging of Macferran, and whom Kit regarded highly; Pegg had little trouble with recalcitrants, Kit explained, for he had been a mightily successful wrestler in his younger days. Morgan Facey divided his redcoats in like fashion. Half were to be left behind as the garrison for Charles Island, and he ensured that good men predominated in that draft. The remaining half of the soldiers, thirty in all, would take passage in Seraph, occupying the berths vacated by the men sent over to Prospect.
These moves, and the consequent transfer of victuals from ship to ship and ship to shore, took the best part of three days, primarily because such work was simply an impossibility in the middle part of the day. At last, and when I finally thought we were ready to proceed up river, Belem came back on board to inform me of a new complication.
'The King of Kombo,' he said, 'is displeased that you have come past his territory and not visited him to pay your respects. This means, of course, that he wants you to pay the dues he thinks himself entitled to from ships that pass his shore.'
This was an imposition that I would gladly have avoided, but I was mindful of the honour of my master King Charles and, more immediately, of the potential fate of the Charles Island garrison once the powerful deterrent provided by Seraph's guns had moved upriver. Consequently, very early the next day a suitably impressive embassy was put ashore by the Seraph's longboat. This consisted of myself, dressed in one of my better frock coats; Belem; O'Dwyer and a dozen soldiers, uniformed to impress; a dozen of my crew, including Carvell and Ali Reis, who were accustomed to such hot climes; and Lieutenant Castle, who spoke some Portuguese and could thus ensure that the pilot, whom I had mistrusted since his gesture of support for O'Dwyer, interpreted accurately.
Even so early in the morning, the sand was burning and the cracked red ground inland from it nearly roasted a man's shoes. There was almost no wind. Belem said that the village of the king was some ten of our English miles from the landing place. I was concerned that the aged, crippled pilot would struggle on such a journey, but I was soon proved wrong; the old man swung along on his crutches without an apparent concern in the world. The flocks of vultures that circled above us would have to wait some considerable time to feast on the bones of Jesus Sebastian Belem, it seemed. By contrast, the normally jovial Castle, a man more accustomed than most of us to hot climes than most of us, struggled to keep up from the very start, perspiring from every pore and gulping in great breaths of air. I suggested that he turn back, or stay where he was, but he would have none of it; he was lieutenant of the Seraph, he said, and honour demanded that his place be at his captain's side.
Soon afterwards, all conversation ceased. Each man was too intent on staying alive in that ferocious heat: blinking and taking breaths became tasks that required conscious effort, and I was sweating so much that I began to imagine myself a creature of water, not of flesh. Our hands came up mechanically to deter the insects that swarmed relentlessly about us. Familiar birds (egrets, terns, lone eagles, the ubiquitous vultures) shared the air with strange species of every colour: blue, red, yellow, green, a veritable rainbow in flight. We sighted the occasional monkey or antelope, and many oxen and cows—which were allowed to roam free, the natives having but little idea of how to farm them to good effect—but alas, my mind was too set on resisting the heat
and staying alive to take much interest in such fauna. About an hour into the journey, I was lost in thoughts of Cornelia, and a pleasant vision of making love with her in the Ravensden ice-house, when...