The Mountain of Gold

by J. D. Davies

  Musk came on deck, grumbling in his unique way. 'Never going to complain of an English winter again,' he said. 'Give me cold, I say. This heat is unnatural. Satan's breath, I reckon. If God had meant Phineas Musk to live in such a clime, he'd have made certain I was born—sweet Jesus and all the angels, what in the name of Hell's fire is that?

  He pointed at what seemed to be a red-brown rock, a few yards from our starboard quarter. But then the rock rose a little further out of the water, and two great eyes returned the stares of the quarterdeck officers of the Seraph.

  Belem smiled. 'Behold the river-horse, gentlemen,' he said. Hippopotamus, as the ancients called it.'

  Thus for the first time in my life I looked upon this massive beast, so much larger than the ox; a creature so awesome that the Egyptians worshipped it as a god. I recalled reading about it in the works of Pliny, but to see it alive, barely a few yards from myself—!

  Musk evidently did not regard the river-horse as a fit object for curiosity. 'Vicious looking beast,' he said. 'Is it likely to attack us?'

  'They,' said Kit, pointing at other 'rocks' nearby, and at beasts lying in the mud at the shoreline. 'If they were minded to attack us, Mister Musk, I think they would comfortably outnumber us.'

  'It will sometimes overturn a canoe or attack men ashore,' said Belem, 'but ships upon the river are safe from it. The river-horse is an evil-tempered beast, but by day, when it soaks itself to avoid the heat, it is also very lazy.'

  'Bald, evil-tempered and lazy,' I said mischievously. 'Why, Musk, does it not resemble you more than a little?'

  Musk, to his credit, took it in good part; by nightfall, indeed, he had taken to referring to hippopotamus as his good-cousin.

  A little further upstream Belem had us steer closer to the south shore, saying that the channel ran deeper on that side for a few miles. This took us close to a landing place where a Dutch flyboat lay at anchor. A long line of black men, all chained together, was shuffling down towards the wharf, overseen by a gaggle of other blacks and a small group of white men.

  I asked him the extent of this trade in these parts.

  'It grows year on year,' he said. 'Not as great on this river as it is down on the Gold Coast, it's true, and not as great as the shipping of ivory, but still a mighty trade. I'm told that over in the Barbadoes and suchlike places, they find the men from these parts too lazy. Doesn't surprise me, that. Still, the kings on the south shore especially, Kombo and Kiang and the like, grow rich on the trade. They're always fighting with their neighbours, so there are many prisoners of war to sell, and criminals from their own people. Sometimes more criminals than there are crimes, depending on how many mouths have to be fed, or so they tell me.'

  We watched as the line of chained man was led down to the wharf, where a boat awaited to take them out to the flyboat, at anchor a half mile or so offshore. One man stumbled, or collapsed in the heat, and dragged the two on either side down with him; all three were whipped to their feet.

  They were innocent days, the 1660s, when set against the boundless evils of our present time, and I could not have envisaged the heights to which this slave-business would rise. What I was witnessing was but the early beginnings of it. Indeed, to my shame Holmes and I were partly and inadvertently responsible for its rise; one of the stated ambitions of the Company of Royal Adventurers, whose cause we were meant to serve, was to seize the trade in slaves from the Dutch and to develop it for the enrichment of England. But that day, upon the river of Gambia, my private opinions on the matter were formed. I recall being at a reception in Kensington Palace a few years ago when a mean north country viscount was holding forth upon slavery, contending that the Romans had favoured it, and the Romans were clearly more civilised than ourselves, ergo slavery must be a mark of a civilised society. Ah yes, I remarked, these being the same Romans who crucified Our Lord and fed his adherents to the lions?

  The next day, we approached a town on the south shore that Belem named as Taukorovalle. The river was narrowing a little now, and the swamps on the north shore had formed themselves into an impenetrable mangrove wall. On the south, herds of elephants and smaller groups of hippopotamus cooled themselves in the mud flats. Taukorovalle itself was a mean place, barely worthy to be called a town, with the same types of huts that had filled the King of Kombo's village. But Belem advised that the town sustained a lively trade in most commodities, and so it proved: barter (with salt as our chief asset) brought us an impressive stock of goats, hens, milk, butter and oranges, as well as quantities of palm wine and the local beer, which Belem named as dullo (and which, compared to good strong English ale, was as good as its name). Purser Harrington and Steward Musk were mightily pleased with these additions to our victuals, but our most unusual acquisition was less of a success: Francis Gale and I both had a mind to try elephant meat, and although it was easy enough to obtain, Bradbury's cooking reduced it almost to cinders. Thus, months later, when Tristram asked me whether I had tasted this great delicacy, I could reply only with an honest 'yes and no'.

  Taukorovalle was the seat of another local king, to whom respects (and 'customs duties', that familiar euphemism for bribes) had to be paid. I half-expected Montnoir to have reached the place before us and to have suborned this potentate rather more successfully than he had the King of Kombo, but my fears seemed groundless. The king was quite a young, languid man, and an altogether more straightforward creature than his equal downstream. Straightforward and considerably more avaricious: not for him the presents in kind that had satisfied the King of Kombo. He was satisfied only with gold coin, a significant quantity of it, and was reluctant to accept King Charles' sovereigns instead of the Dutch florins that were evidently more to his liking. I had little doubt that this monarch would not be as swift to reject Montnoir's gold as his colleague at Kombo had been.

  A ship lay at anchor in the stream off Taukorovalle; not a flyboat but an older and narrower type of vessel with a high stern. It seemed strangely out of place in these waters, and it flew colours that I did not recognise: blue, with a white cross upon dark red in the canton. We hailed it, and the man who came aboard us proved to be a countryman of Captain Stiel. Unlike the amiable Stiel, he spoke no English, but both his Dutch and my own were tolerable enough for us to understand each other. He named himself as Valdis Vestermans, chief mate of the Krokodil, originally intended to establish a trading post for the Duke of Courland further up the river, at Kasang, our own destination. Vestermans was one of only eleven men remaining to her, a quarter of her original crew; the rest, including the master, had died of the fevers during the last wet season. The ship had run onto a nearby shoal during a storm, and although this surviving remnant of her crew managed to refloat her, they were struggling to repair her and make her ready to return down river, where they hoped (with little optimism) to recruit enough men to form a crew that could carry her back to the eastern end of the Baltic. Vestermans was an old seaman, and as such enough of a pragmatist not even to think of asking an English man-of-war if she could delay her voyage, or lend a few dozen men, so that his crew could complete their work. I wished him well, and so we parted; but the formality of taking him to the larboard rail brought me a troubling sight. Tide and flow meant that larboard faced the shore, and as I said my farewell to Vestermans, I noticed two men in earnest conversation upon the strand of Taukorovalle. They were Brian Doyle O'Dwyer and Jesus Sebastian Belem.

  From Taukorovalle, the river ran a little north of east towards Tindobauge, the next important town. The channel was narrowing now, and I estimated that the tidal mud flats would soon become an increasing obstacle to our proceeding under sail, at least by night. Belem said that the river ahead was also full of rocks and submerged trees, which inclined Negus, Kit Farrell and myself toward the same conclusion. But we were also experiencing longer calms—we were almost upon the cusp of the dry and wet seasons—and with the tides weakening with every mile we took away from the sea, the river current flowing downstream against us becam
e a steadily more formidable foe. Consequently, I ordered an extra two glasses of rest in the middle of the day, for I knew that the men would soon have the back-breaking work of towing ahead of them. I spent much of that brief holiday lying on my sea-bed, unable to sleep in the stifling heat, praying that I did not become fodder for a mosquito, and debating with myself on whether to tackle Belem about his meeting ashore with O'Dwyer. There was little sound beyond the ceaseless song of the birds, the occasional call of a baboon or some other beast, and the casting or drawing in of lines by those men who braved the heat of the upper deck in order to fish.

  Then I heard O'Dwyer's familiar, unwelcome voice from behind the partition.

  'Well, Captain—you've had a mind as to how you'll spend your riches from this expedition?'

  I sighed. I wanted conversation with no man, and especially not with this one; I wanted only sleep.

  'No, Colonel,' I said tersely. 'I have not thought upon it.' Because there will be no riches to think upon.

  Ah well ... I should. The mountain of gold is ... well, it could be many things to many people. But for you, Captain, it could prove very lucrative. Very lucrative indeed.'

  I was tired, I was hot, and despite myself, I said that which had been in my thoughts since my very first meeting with the Irishman on the deck of the Wessex. 'There is no mountain, O'Dwyer. It was a lie that you invented to save your neck. God forgive England for having a king who can be gulled so easily by the likes of you.'

  I heard the renegade's low chuckle. 'Ah now, my poor Captain, you're still only staring at the obvious, that you are. After all, what brought our friend Montnoir chasing after me all across the Mediterranean, and now down in this place as well? What brought Prince Rupert himself here?' A pause—'But it seems to me that you're having a poor return for all your exertions thus far. I've seen you laying out your own credit for victuals at Tenerife and Taukorovalle, and no doubt the king won't pay you a penny until well beyond the end of this voyage. Is that not always the way of it?' I kept my peace. I would not allow my mouth to agree with O'Dwyer, though my head and heart knew the truth of his words all too well. It always was the way of it; captains of Charles the Second's navy invariably had to employ their own credit on expeditions abroad, hoping thereafter that arrears of pay, if and when they were eventually settled, made good the shortfall, and that bills of exchange were not rejected by some clerk upon the slightest of pretexts.

  'So what I was thinking was this, Captain,' the renegade continued. 'Supposing I was to go ashore at one of the towns upstream—Mangegar, say, or Kasang—and make contact with some of the Arab factors who come down to those parts. Well, I know those sorts of men, you see. It would be an easy matter to arrange an advance against your share of the mountain.' Dear God— 'But they're discreet sorts of men, the Arabs. They'd be scared off, I reckon, by the sight of too many of your rude tarpaulins—'

  Damn the man! He thought so little of me that he thought I could be bribed as easily as some cheap mercenary! Bribed to allow him to escape back to his Barbary friends, no doubt.

  Of course, a man of no honour might have considered it thus: if there was no mountain of gold, then what was lost if the Irishman simply vanished? Nothing; for that was what this same man of no honour would have expected of another man of no honour. Who would know the truth? No man; for we were very, very far from England. But what would be gained? A goodly purse of gold, and no accounting for it to the Lord Treasurer or Lord Admiral. Gold in hand, and not the vague hope of the accumulated arrears of my eight pounds and eight shillings a month, paid many months hence. Gold that might prove useful insurance against the prospect of yet another change of rule in England, if yet another Stuart king lost his throne through his own duplicity and weakness.

  Fortunate, then, that Matthew Quinton was not a man of no honour. That knowledge suddenly weighed heavily upon my dutiful heart.

  I lay there for some time, saying nothing. I heard a soft 'Captain?' from O'Dwyer, and a little later, a whispered 'Quinton?' Then there was nothing, and after a while longer, I heard the man's intolerable snoring begin. He must have assumed that I, too, had fallen asleep.

  Instead, I reached into my sea-chest and produced the document that had been handed to me by the king himself upon Newmarket Heath.

  Secret and Additional Instructions to be Observed by Captain Matthew Quinton, read the legend upon it. By royal command, it had remained unopened all this time; was only to be opened, indeed, in a very specific set of circumstances. These circumstances had been described to me by a discreet royal whisper in my ear just before Pepys and I were dismissed from the royal presence on that late summer's day at Newmarket, now so long ago and so very far away.

  I made my decision and ran my finger under the wax seal. I unfolded the document slowly and silently so as not to awaken O'Dwyer.

  I read. And I smiled.

  Twenty-One

  Above Tindobauge, the next large town upstream, the river narrowed to less than a mile wide. We usually rowed and towed for the best part of the day, and also for much of the night. Thus we but barely resembled a man-of-war. Our two boats and our sweeps pulled us forward as well as they could, but this was hot and sore work even by the relative cool of the night, so I ordered the men relieved at every turn of the glass. With no work to do aloft, the rest of the men waited their turn upon oars, snatching some sleep upon the deck (cooler than the messes below decks, but more prone to mosquitoes) or fishing from the rail. We became accustomed to the sounds: the splash of the oars into the water, the constant heaving of the lead and calling of our soundings, the endless buzzing and clicking of the insects, the occasional bellowing of an elephant or roar of a lion. Above us, great storks and tiny, colourful parrots soared or plunged; and, ever present, the vultures awaited their moment.

  All in pursuit of the chimera at the end of the river, the mountain of gold. If old Bosch could be brought back to life in our own times, I thought, he need look no further for his Ship of Fools.

  So it went on. The nimble Seraph, which under full sail and with a favourable wind could cover a full ten miles each hour, was now lucky to manage five in a day. There were fresh reports of peevishness in the messes, of strong words, and petty thefts and over-eager fists, the sure signs of a fractious and increasingly unhappy crew. Deprived of William Castle's firm, fair leadership, the Bristol hands were particularly forward in voicing their discontent: I received more than one delegation intent on denouncing Bradbury's cooking, or the state of the wine, or the allocation to quarters, but it was obvious that behind each respectful request, each deferential grumble, lay an unspoken plea to abandon this benighted voyage and rejoin Holmes, who was rumoured to be sweeping up untold Dutch riches all along the Guinea coast. Although he could say nothing, the captain of the Seraph had not a little sympathy with such arguments.

  And on either side of us lay mysterious, threatening shores, often empty, sometimes swarming with beasts, sometimes peopled by natives who eyed us with who knew what emotions. Once, the sun was so strong and my mind so addled from too long on deck that I could have sworn I glimpsed an impossible sight on a clear patch of ground beyond the mangroves: two riders, one in a dragoon's uniform and bearing in his hand the white fleur-de-lis banner of the Bourbons, the other an unmistakeable figure in the cloak of a Knight of Malta. I blinked and the apparition was gone, but it unsettled me mightily.

  Worst of all, sickness was increasing, an ominous sign indeed so many weeks before the beginning of the wet season, when the fevers would be at their height. Since losing Castle, we had committed to the river one of the better Bristol men and one of Facey's soldiers. Humphrey, the surgeon, had four more under treatment, two of whom had come to him in the last day alone. He suspected the marsh ague, malaria, in three of the cases, though the fourth, young Penhallow, my companion in severing the cable during the fire at Deptford, had a fearful case of the bloody flux. There was little point in prescribing the eternal surgeon's remedy of bleeding to him; a
pity, for Lanherne reckoned he had the makings of a good seaman. I sorrowed as I agreed that Penhallow should be given up for dead and laid upon a platform in the hold to await his end.

  Early one morning, with the dawn just breaking, we were nearing the landmark shown on Belem's charts as Elephant Island. The river flowed around it in two remarkably deep channels, with twenty fathoms' water or more. Rupert and Holmes had reconnoitred this as a possible site for a fort, it seemed, but were soon dissuaded; and in truth, I have never seen a less military isle. It was nothing more than a tangle of high mangroves, some three leagues in circuit. I sent a boat's party to examine it, but they reported that the ground consisted of a clay-like slime, and that the high tides lapped over it to a depth of a foot or more.

  With my curiosity about the island satisfied, I went below to visit the dying Penhallow. To this day, I do not know quite why I did so. I think I felt guilt that this good and honest fellow, one who had followed me so loyally and assisted me so notably at Deptford, would die on my account on such a desperate fool's errand, and I was mindful of the dire impact his death would have on his ancient widowed mother. Both Kit Farrell and Musk chided me for this womanish concern for just one rude tarpaulin's death, but somehow I felt that young Penhallow deserved his captain's company as he took his final journey. Thus I went down into the very bowels of the ship, to the hold itself. That dark space was blessedly cool, although the climate made the bilges stink even more prodigiously than usual. The platform on which Penhallow had been placed was concealed behind a pile of victuallers' barrels. The young man, his flesh grey and damp, was wholly unaware of my presence. I sat and prayed silently as his breaths got shallower and further apart.