1636: The China Venture

by Eric Flint

  “Yes, young master.”

  “You are on red ant patrol. You must walk in a low crouch so you can see their holes. When you think you have found one, scatter cuttlefish bones nearby, to lure them out. Show no mercy! If you fail in your mission, the red ants will devour the tenderest shoots!”

  “Xun!”

  “What are your orders, sir?”

  “You are on snail and slug patrol. You may sleep during the day. At night, take a lantern and a bucket of saltwater and walk the crop rows; if you find a culprit, grab him with chopsticks and drop him into the bucket.

  “The rest of you, go about your normal gardening and farming tasks, but be vigilant for pests. Report anything unusual to me.”

  Fang Yizhi clapped his hands twice. “Dismissed!”

  Year of the Dog, Third Month (March 29–April 26, 1634)

  Tongcheng

  Fang Weiyi and her older sister Mengshi stood side by side in a horse-drawn cart. They were on their way to the Yingjiang Temple in Anqing. “Yingjiang” meant “Greeting the River,” an apt name given its proximity to the Yangtze.

  “I am so glad you can come and visit, Mengshi. You have been away from us, with your husband in Shandong, too long.” Shandong was the coastal province, north of Nanjing, that jutted into the Yellow Sea, like a ship’s prow, pointing toward Korea.

  “I am so grateful that he lets me travel with him from one appointment to the next, rather than make me live at home with his mother. And that he received an emergency appointment in Jiangxi, to serve out the term of a commissioner who died unexpectedly.” Weiyi and Mengshi’s hometown of Tongcheng lay in Nan-Zhili, in the part sometimes called Anhui, whereas Jiangxi was the province south of Nan-Zhili. Mengshi’s husband Zhang Bingwen’s new job lay in Jiujiang, on the Yangtze, and midway between Anqing and Nanchang.

  Zhang Bingwen had stopped in Tongcheng to pay his respects to Fang Kongzhao, his brother-in-law, and then hurried on to Jiujiang—his orders specified the date by which he must arrive there, and there had been some unexpected delays on the Grand Canal. And in any event, he knew he was being sent to clean up the mess left behind by the deceased official, and that it would only get worse if he delayed. But he didn’t want Mengshi to miss so good an opportunity to visit her family, so he left her in Tongcheng, with a couple of retainers to escort her to Jiujiang when she was ready to continue her journey.

  “Mengshi, I am worried about Yizhi.”

  “Yizhi? But I just saw him, he seemed to be in excellent health. He is out in the gardens in the day, and I saw him in a pavilion studying by torchlight some evenings ago.”

  “He is still in the pavilion, but drinking too much, rather than studying,” Weiyi complained.

  “But Yizhi has always been such a dutiful student…”

  “He is still upset about failing the provincial examination last year. His spirits lifted briefly with the coming of spring, but that didn’t last.”

  “Oh, my,” said Mengshi. “I understand now. The national examination is in session in Beijing right now—the exam he would have taken if he had passed the provincial one.” While women could not take the examinations, as women belonging to the family of a scholar-official they knew that one could not obtain a ranked official position without being a jinshi—a presented scholar. And that in turn meant passing the national and palace examinations.

  Even a juren, a recommended man, could at best serve as a secretary to a ranked official, or perhaps an assistant police magistrate in a remote district. And Yizhi, having failed the provincial examination, wasn’t even a juren.

  “I suppose he has friends taking the national examination now, too.”

  “Yes, Chen Zilong from Songjiang. His second attempt, I believe. Others too, I’m sure.”

  “If I had known,” said Mengshi, “I’d have invited him to join us on this visit to Yingjiang. Perhaps, in bowing to the Buddha, he would cleanse his soul.”

  Fang Weiyi had begun visiting the temple many years ago, simply because a trip to a temple was an acceptable reason for a gentry woman to leave the house. After the death of her husband, her daughter, and her sister-in-law (Yizhi’s mother), her interest in Buddhism became more serious, and she sometimes created art, especially bamboo fans, that featured Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy.

  “I agree,” said Weiyi.

  “And if that fails, perhaps we can get him to go to an opera. Perhaps one of Ruan Dacheng’s? He lives here in Anqing.”

  “He does, Mengshi. I hear that Dacheng’s daughter Lizhen is trying to write an opera herself. Something about a love triangle.”

  “Aren’t all operas about love triangles?” Weiyi laughed. “But more power to her.”

  “So, how’s life in Tongcheng these days? Quiet as always?”

  Weiyi frowned. “In our household, Yizhi’s future is our principal worry. But in Tongcheng at large, there have been some disquieting developments.”

  Mengshi’s eyebrows rose. “Disquieting?”

  “Abuse of temporary sons-in-law.” A temporary son-in-law was a freeman who was hired to work for a certain number of months or years in a household, and, as part of the deal, was married to an unfree maidservant of that household. The more liberal landowners permitted the temporary son-in-law to redeem his wife, and any child borne while she was a slave, but some would refuse to accept any payment and, if the hireling fled with his family, treat him as a runaway bondservant and send government agents or thugs after him.

  “And for every bondservant who’s mistreated, there’s another that glories in the landlord’s legal protection and extorts payments from those without such protection. And of course, the landlord gets blamed for the bondservant’s misdeeds.”

  “Surely Kongzhao does not tolerate such behavior in the Fang clan.”

  “No, he doesn’t. But there may be Fangs who misbehave surreptitiously, and in any event, we’re not the only gentry family in Tongcheng.”

  “Well, I hope people come to their senses before there’s a bondservant uprising like the one in Macheng four years ago.”

  Mengshi shuddered delicately.

  Chapter 10

  May 1634

  Stockholm

  At the Stockholm Mint, Marcus Koch, the mint master of Stockholm, and Captain Hamilton of the Groen Feniks watched as silver bars and coins were counted out and placed in iron-bound wooden boxes, each weighing perhaps five hundred pounds when fully loaded with eight thousand or so coins. The size of the box was deliberate; the Mint didn’t want a box to be easy for a lone thief to carry off. Once the box was locked shut, the captain and the mint master affixed their seals to it. The boxes and keys were numbered and a code book indicated which keys opened which boxes.

  The silver was not of Swedish origin, since Sweden was not a major silver producer. But German and Spanish silver had been paid for with Swedish copper and iron, or extorted by Swedish warships collecting ship-tolls at Baltic harbors.

  Captain Hamilton’s Groen Feniks was capable of carrying about one hundred eighty tons cargo. It had been built by the Dutch in 1625, so it had already seen almost a decade of service at sea, but never in that decade had it been called upon to carry so valuable a cargo.

  Fortunately for Captain Hamilton’s peace of mind, he would carry the silver only as far as Göteborg. There it would be transferred temporarily to the great fortress of Älvsborg, and then to an East Indiaman, the Rode Draak, that was anchored there. The pair would journey together to China.

  The Groen Feniks was what the Dutch called a pinas. These could be used either as merchantmen or as warships, depending on the choice of guns, the size of the crew, and the absence or presence of marines. In 1629, the cities of Kalmar and Jönköping purchased it and donated it to the Swedish Navy, naming it the Kalmar Nyckel, the Key of Kalmar. The purchase was part of a program in which Swedish cities purchased dual-purpose ships which could be used for both home defense and for commercial voyages. Although a mission to China was more ambitious than the no
rm. Its new name reflected its new mission, the phoenix being a Chinese mythological creature, usually paired with the dragon.

  Thanks to up-time technology, the news of the Danish surrender at Copenhagen in June 1634 had reached Stockholm the very day on which it occurred. The SEAC director in residence in Stockholm heard about it the following morning, and by that afternoon and the evening had met with the Lord High Treasurer Gabriel Bengtsson, Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna and Admiral Karl Karlsson Gyllenhjelm. All three of whom, not incidentally, were stockholders.

  He pointed out to them that the mainstay of any trading mission to China would be exchanging silver for silk. And that they had a ship which had been designed for the Europe–China route, the Rode Draak, in Göteborg, but it couldn’t leave until they could stock its hold with silver. Moving the silver by land would have been expensive, and sending it by sea impossible as long as the Danish were blockading the Kattegat. But now that the war was over, it could go by sea…but time was of the essence.

  “Why?” Oxenstierna had asked.

  “Because right now the prevailing wind on the sea-route through the Baltic is from the east,” the admiral explained. “But come June, it will switch to the west, and will stay that way all summer.”

  “Waiting until the summer will increase the passage time from Stockholm to Göteborg by anywhere from one to three months,” the SEAC director added.

  “I will speak to the Master of the Mint,” said the chancellor.

  * * *

  Two days later, the entire silver shipment was ready to be transported to the Groen Feniks. There were a dozen silver chests in all.

  Before the procession began, the Myntgatan and the streets leading from it to the dock nearest the Royal Mint were closed to ordinary traffic; a crier walked down their length warning that anyone who stepped out of one of the buildings on that street before the “all clear” was given would be shot, and the side streets were barricaded off and guards posted.

  The escort assembled in the square outside the Royal Mint. A squadron of cavalry headed the procession, the hooves of their horses striking sparks from the cobblestones. Then came the carriage of Marcus Koch, and a series of sealed wagons, each with a driver and two soldiers. Last came a second squadron of cavalry, which could quickly ride forward if there were any disturbance. There was none.

  In due course, they arrived at the dock, which itself was under heavy guard. As each wagon was unloaded, the boxes were counted off and the seals checked for tampering. Some boxes were carried by the crew up the gangway, and others were hoisted over by the ship’s heaviest tackles. Of course, before hoisting, a buoy rope was attached; if the hoist gave way and the box fell into the water, the buoy would mark its position.

  Once the silver was safely on board, the cavalry commander ceremoniously delivered the key codebook to Captain Hamilton. On the ship, the boxes were counted and checked once again by the first mate, before being taken down by the most trusted men. A portion of the hold was barricaded off, and there would be armed guards around the clock by the access hatch until the silver was safely transferred to the custody of the warden of the Älvsborg.

  * * *

  Using the Groen Feniks for the China mission wasn’t a last-minute decision. Early in 1634, the Swedish Navy agreed that it could be chartered by the Swedish East Asia Company as soon as the Danes were defeated. The influential promoters of the SEAC then made sure that the Groen Feniks was one of the first Swedish warships to get carronades, cast in Sweden based on USE instructions.

  Carronades combined several old ideas. They had shorter barrels than long guns of equal caliber, like the “drakes” and “cutts” that were in some seventeenth-century armories. They also had narrower powder chambers, just as mortars always had. Because they took smaller powder charges relative to the shot weight than a long gun, the barrel thickness and the “windage” (the difference between the shot and bore diameters) could be reduced.

  Of course, they also had a lower muzzle velocity, and thus a shorter maximum range, than the long gun of equal caliber. But maximum range usually wasn’t all that important in naval warfare, and the range discrepancy was less when compared with long guns of equal gun weight.

  In the old time line, carronades were first manufactured in 1778, and used on merchant ships and privateers. Indeed, they were considered ideal merchantman guns because they required a smaller crew but provided a heavy broadside to a ship in danger of being boarded. Within a year, they were also secondary armament on some naval vessels.

  In the Baltic War, all of the USE ironclads and timberclads carried eight-inch carronades. They normally fired explosive shells, but if they were loaded with solid shot, the latter would have weighed about sixty-eight pounds.

  Of course, since it wasn’t a full-time warship, the Groen Feniks had to settle for replacing its twelve conventional six-pounders with thirty-two-pound carronades, rather than the heavier models used to outfit the USE timberclads. But its “smashers,” as the supplier called them, weighed no more than the shortest conventional six-pounder.

  Even though the Groen Feniks was an armed vessel, and the Baltic was now at peace, in view of the value of its cargo, it would have two escorts until it reached Göteborg: the seventy-four-gun Kronan, built in 1633, and the thirty-gun Scepter, built in 1616. The Kronan itself had some full-size carronades recently installed on its quarterdeck.

  The Scepter led the way out of Stockholm Harbor, followed by the Groen Feniks, with the Kronan lumbering along in its wake. Captain Hamilton was happy enough to have a local skipper in the lead; the Stockholm archipelago was a maze of waterways. He was even more relieved when, after about eight hours, they reached the open waters of the Baltic.

  Over the next few days, the three ships hugged the Swedish coast, where the winds were most favorable. They curved around to enter the Great Belt, between the islands of Funen and Zealand. The senior captain, on the Kronan, would have preferred to take the Øresund, and sail by Copenhagen—reminding Christian the Fourth that the Swedes had won the war—but the damn Danes had mined those waters near Helsingør back in April, and hadn’t cleaned up their mess yet.

  The detour also lengthened what would probably have been a ten-day cruise up to fourteen days. But that was good enough; Captain Hamilton had been told that the powers that be in the SEAC had decided upon a September departure.

  June 1634

  Göteborg

  Entering Göteborg harbor, the Groen Feniks exchanged salutes, first with Älvsborg Fortress, and then with the Rode Draak. Captain Hamilton studied the East Indiaman carefully; it seemed to be of conventional construction, and well maintained. Of course the last was no surprise, given that it was nigh on brand-new.

  According to his briefing, the Rode Draak, the “Red Dragon,” was an East Indiaman built at the Amsterdam shipyard. It had just been completed in September 1633 when the news of the Dutch defeat at the Battle of Dunkirk arrived. Even as the Amsterdam chamber of the Dutch East India Company debated what to do, news had come of the fall of Rotterdam and Haarlem. And then the Catholic provinces of the north had rebelled against the House of Orange. The chamber had considered sending the new ship to New Netherlands, or to the East Indies, but with Amsterdam expected to be placed under siege and blockade they couldn’t spare the sailors or soldiers to man it for so long a voyage. As there was no refuge anywhere in the little stretch of coastline still under the Prince of Orange’s control, it had been sent instead with a skeleton crew to Gothenburg, a Swedish port founded in 1621, and with a large Dutch population. Ultimately, Gustav Adolf was persuaded that Sweden should have its own Asian trading company, and the Rode Draak was chartered (at a bargain price) for this endeavor.

  Since it was the larger ship, it was certain that Captain Hamilton would be under the orders of Captain Lyell, the Rode Draak’s skipper. He had never met the man, but they had some friends in common. Lyell was considered to be a man who thought before he acted.

  Hamilton was unde
r the impression that Lyell had made at least one voyage previously to Asia, under the VOC flag, but whether as captain or mate, he didn’t know. Hamilton himself had never sailed beyond Bordeaux. For both their sakes, he hoped that the SEAC had lined up an expert on Asian waters to accompany them. As the proverb said, “There’s many a slip between cup and lip.”

  * * *

  Göteborg in 1634 was only a little more than a decade old, its predecessor having been burnt by the Danes, and its main industry was fishing not trade. During the Baltic War, it had increased strategic importance because of the closing of the Øresund to the Swedes, and shipbuilding materials and armaments had been transported there by roads and inland waterways from Örebro and Stockholm.

  Soon after the Groen Feniks docked at Göteborg, Captain Hamilton learned that plans had changed…again. While Göteborg had been valuable to Sweden because ships could sail from there without encountering the navigational difficulties of the Danish archipelago, or passing the gauntlet of the Danish straits fortifications, it still was inferior to the Netherlands, or even Hamburg, as the jump-off point for an Asia voyage. Ships at Göteborg would have to cross the fickle North Sea, and it could take weeks or even months to reach the English Channel.

  As long as Amsterdam was enduring a Spanish siege and Spanish warships lurking off the Dutch coast, Göteborg was an acceptable fallback. But now…

  Not only had the Danes surrendered and been bridled into the new Union of Kalmar, the arrival of the timberclad Achates and its escorts in the Zuiderzee had forced Don Fernando to declare an immediate cease-fire. While the siege of Amsterdam had not formally been lifted, the Dutch investors in the SEAC were sure that the combination of political pressure and judicious bribery would ensure that the Groen Feniks and the Rode Draak would be allowed to enter and leave Amsterdam. Especially since the latest radio report said that there were now six timberclads swanning about the Zuiderzee, each armed with a dozen sixty-eight-pound carronades loaded with explosive shells. Under the circumstances, Admiral Don Antonio de Oquendo probably didn’t blow his nose without first getting permission from USE Commodore Henderson.