The Vanishing Island

by Barry Wolverton

“On a company ship like ours, the most important part is the hold. That’s why the decks are a bit narrow,” said Sean, drawing the shape of a pear with his hands. “The ship is designed to maximize storage space.” He found an empty berth and helped Bren string his hammock, then took him up one level to the storage deck. “This is where we keep supplies like extra canvas, rope, spars, and our small guns. Mr. Leiden’s cabin is aft, and fore is the galley, the daily ration room, and the crew’s saloon. You’ll take your meals and your daily jenny there.”

  “Jenny?” said Bren.

  “Jenever,” said Sean. “A drink the Dutch make from juniper berries. Clear as water, but it’s a tommyknocker.”

  “I don’t drink spirits,” said Bren.

  “That will change,” said Sean. “Now get dressed and meet me on deck. Oh, and speak Dutch if you can; learn it if you can’t.”

  “Wait,” said Bren. “What about . . . when I need to . . .”

  “Shake the potatoes dry?” said Sean, laughing. “For you, front of the ship, on the goblin deck. Where you sleep,” he explained, when he saw Bren’s confusion. “That’s what hob is short for—hobgoblin. On account of how crew are like a gang of dwarves living underground, doing hard labor.”

  After that unwelcome comparison Bren went below to relieve himself, but when he found the privies he almost changed his mind. It was just a hole that emptied into the sea—a hole almost big enough for a spindly boy to fall through.

  On deck Sean was waiting for him in the middle of the ship, his hand resting against the mainmast. “You’ve heard the phrase ‘learn the ropes’?” he said. “Well, here’s your chance.”

  Bren was excited at first. One of his favorite adventure books was about a ship’s boy forced to take control of a ship after the captain and other officers died mysteriously, with only a pig as his first mate. Bren needed to know how a ship worked inside and out if he ever hoped to duplicate Bowman’s feat of rising from stowaway to admiral.

  After a brief but confusing recitation of masts, sails, booms, spars, and jibs, the rest of Bren’s first day in uniform was spent doing physical labor that dwarfed anything he had ever done before. He spent an hour trying to assemble and disassemble something called a block and tackle, a pulley machine for lifting cargo. Another hour or so was spent on his hands and knees, holystoning the deck. This involved using a piece of sandstone to scour the deck clean and remove splinters. It turned out that sails, which looked like bedsheets when billowing in the wind, were actually made of thick canvas and weighed several hundred pounds each. Adjusting or untangling them—to say nothing of replacing a sail entirely—required a small army of men. The first time Bren grabbed one of the ropes that worked the sails, he was almost yanked off the deck.

  His greenness didn’t go without notice.

  “Look up there, boy,” came a Dutch voice, speaking English, as Bren was struggling with the corner of a large sail. He turned around to find a hob with dark eyes and deep scars on both sides of his face hovering over him.

  “In time you’ll have to learn to haul in sails a hundred feet in the air,” said the man, pointing to the top of the towering mainmast. “And with the ship heaving and tossing on the waves, like a bucking horse. You think you can handle that? Because if you can’t, those ropes won’t catch you if you fall. And whether you hit the deck or the water from that high up, the result is the same.”

  The man clapped his hands together so hard Bren jumped. He was too scared to speak.

  “Mr. Bruun, that’s enough,” said Sean, strolling up to them. “We were all Johnnies once.”

  The man growled and walked off, but not without giving Bren a look that told him he’d better learn fast or the crew would eat him alive.

  “Don’t mind Otto,” said Sean. “Come on, I’ve got something a bit easier for you to do.”

  “There’s more?” said Bren.

  “Just getting started, little brother.”

  Fortunately for Bren, his next chore involved sitting down. Sean gave him a rope and a chart of all the boating knots he needed to learn. The chart showed forty-eight different knots, and Bren began to wonder if he was being hazed. These couldn’t all be real, could they? Sheepshank, cleat hitch halyard, carrick bend, pile hitch, pig knuckle, goose neck, oxbow, triple axel, horcrux, four-in-hand . . . how long would this take?

  “It’s like lacing your boots,” said Mouse, startling Bren, who had never heard the boy talk. It was strange hearing a Germanic language coming from an Eastern face. He took the rope from Bren and quickly tied and untied four or five different knots.

  “I only lace my boots one way,” said Bren. He looked at the chart. “Four-in-hand, I think.”

  A pair of hobs walked by. “Mouse, what are you talking to him for?” said one. “He ain’t got fur nor feathers.” They walked on, laughing.

  “What was that about?” said Bren.

  “Nothing,” said Mouse.

  The signal bell began to ring.

  “First mess,” said Mouse, who stood up and gave the rope back to Bren.

  Everything on a ship was done in shifts, called watches, including meals. Each man was assigned to a “mess,” and Bren could hardly wait for his turn at dinner. All of the twenty or so men in Bren’s mess gathered around one long wooden table in the saloon, and what followed reminded Bren of old Mr. Pitken feeding his hounds—growling men converging on everything Cook put in front of them. Except they smelled worse than Mr. Pitken’s hounds.

  When Bren finally got a plate, he almost lost his appetite, despite how hungry he was. There were fatty sausages called porknokker, served with sauerkraut and rye bread with a lard spread called smear. Legume pottage turned out to be a flavorless mush of beans, and the thing Bren was most looking forward to—the wheels of Gouda and Edam cheese—were gone before he could get at them.

  It was only when he was three or four bites into his pottage that Bren realized it was crawling with weevils. The older hobs laughed at Bren when they saw his disgust.

  “When the porknokker’s gone you’ll appreciate those little buggers, boy! It’ll be the only meat left!” The grizzled man who said this stuck a filthy finger into Bren’s plate, lifted up a dollop of bean mush with two weevils on top, and licked his finger clean.

  The other men at the table laughed and laughed, except one. It was Otto, the dark-eyed brute from before. He was less ravenous than the others, but at the same time seemed more animal. He reminded Bren of a wolf. His scars appeared deeper and his eyes even darker next to so many of his blue-eyed Dutch compatriots. He kept looking at Bren during supper, and every time he did Bren had to look away.

  Bren thought those eyes would haunt his dreams. Mr. Black had once told him that you can conquer fear by distracting yourself, so before crawling into his hammock, he opened his foot locker and took out a small journal he had nicked from Black’s Books. He drew a map of the ship and labeled the decks and the masts and the sails. He sketched and named as many of the strange knots as he could remember. He started a running list of ship’s slang, even though half the words made him blush.

  He was too exhausted to do more, so he put the journal away and lay back, trying to picture just what the vanishing island might look like, and how vast the lost treasure of Marco Polo might be. But despite his best efforts, he kept thinking of the place he had left instead, and his father and Mr. Black, and how he had let them down. But he would be back, and if the admiral was right, he would come home wealthy. That was what he told himself, just before falling into a bottomless sleep.

  CHAPTER

  15

  THE BEAR AND THE LION

  The next morning, Bren flopped from his hammock eager to prove his worth, but his body betrayed him. He could barely stand, sick with ache from his first day’s work. As the newest crew member, he was asked to help swab the deck, which meant rising with the sun and hauling up fresh seawater with the wash pump. Here was his chance to impress the men with his cleaning experience from the vomitorium,
except every swish of the mop felt like his muscles were tearing from the bone. At breakfast he could barely lift his arms to eat his stroopwafel, a sort of pancake with black syrup, and he had to bend over his tin cup to drink his coffee like a cat. Again, most of the men in his mess thought this was funny, remembering their first time on a ship, but Otto just looked at Bren with contempt.

  “Eat up,” he said. “The least you can do is put some meat on those bones, in case we run out of food and have to make a meal out of you.”

  Bren almost spit up his waffle. His eyes darted around the room to see if anyone was laughing, but no one was.

  When the shift bell rang, he vowed to ignore the pain and pull his weight, but Sean unexpectedly let him off the hook: “Bowman wants to see you.”

  When Bren entered the chart room, it was as if he had never left. Admiral Bowman was behind his desk, feet up, Mr. Richter was on the sofa, Mouse was in the corner, and Mr. Tybert was at the map table, seeming to look at the maps and at Bren at the same time with his one good eye.

  “Bren, I’ve decided you should apprentice with Mr. Tybert,” said the admiral. “Navigation and mapmaking go hand in hand, of course, and I’m hoping you have an instinct for it.”

  Mr. Tybert expressed his skepticism with a grunt. Bren could see from where he was standing that the navigator was charting the first main leg of their course: Map to the Cape Colony, at the tip of Africa. More than five thousand nautical miles, if Bren remembered his studies correctly, from the north Atlantic, across the equator, and into the southern hemisphere.

  “Besides,” the admiral added, “it has been observed that you don’t yet have, what should I call it . . . the stamina to join the regular crew.”

  “Spindly!” said Mr. Richter, from the sofa.

  “You can also help Mouse with some of the ship’s boy duties, and we can teach you to mend sails, keep time, clean, and paint. Along with your time here helping decode our map, you won’t have an idle moment.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Oh, and about our little project,” the admiral added, gesturing to the Chinese symbols. “That’s between the occupants of this room. The men know our mission, mind you, just not that I haven’t pinpointed our exact location. But as you know, I am a man of great faith,” he said, lifting up his sleeve to reveal the black tulip tattoo again.

  Bren opened his mouth to speak . . . to ask a million questions. But just then the bell began to ring. Not the clocklike chime signaling a change in watch. This sounded more like an alarm. He looked at the admiral, who quickly put on his jacket and grabbed a brass spyglass.

  “Ships have been spotted.”

  “Where are they?” said Mr. Richter. “How many?”

  Bren had never seen Mr. Richter so animated. They were on the poop deck, the small deck at the very back of the ship, and he was pacing from one side to the other. Apparently he hadn’t planned on anyone disrupting his cruise.

  “Iberian galleons,” said Admiral Bowman, his spyglass fixed on the horizon. “Two.”

  “Must’ve been waiting for us,” said Mr. Tybert. “We just crossed the Lisbon line.” The poop deck was the navigator’s home. He took all his measurements from here, to chart both their location and their course. By the Lisbon line, he meant the latitude, or north-south position, of the Portuguese capital.

  Mr. Tybert also kept big white seabirds in cages, for reasons Bren didn’t understand. They squawked every time Mr. Richter walked by.

  “Mr. van Decken, get the angle of interception,” said the admiral, and the first mate immediately began relaying orders to the man on duty in the crow’s nest.

  “Angle of interception?” said Mr. Richter. “What’s that? We’re going to outrun them, right? That’s what we’re known for—speed?”

  “They don’t have to be as fast if they don’t have as far to go,” said the admiral. Mr. Richter didn’t seem satisfied with this answer, storming to the other side of the deck, leaving a chaos of squawking birds in his wake.

  The man in the crow’s nest relayed his observations to the deck, and the admiral led everyone below to the chart room.

  “You’re saying they’re going to catch us?” said Mr. Richter, clambering down the ladder after them.

  “It’s very likely,” said the admiral. “But panicking isn’t going to help, is it? Why don’t you retire to your cabin for the time being, Mr. Richter? I’ll let you know if we need your combat skills.” Mr. Richter responded to the insult by plopping himself down on the sofa with a scowl on his face. “Now then, Mr. Tybert, let’s look at how things will play out.”

  The last person Bren wanted to sympathize with was the company man, but he was anxious to know what exactly the angle of interception meant as well, and what Admiral Bowman was going to do about it. Surely he had plans for this sort of thing? He watched as the officers stood on either side of the navigator, who drew a V between the current location of the Iberian ships and the Albatross.

  “They’ll be in firing range here,” said Mr. Tybert.

  Firing range? thought Bren, and no sooner had he thought it than Mr. Richter had said it aloud. The officers ignored him.

  “We could outrun them still,” said Mr. Tybert.

  “By sailing off course, you mean,” said the admiral.

  “We’re at least two knots faster than a galleon. They won’t catch us if we give them a wide berth.”

  The admiral thought about it. “No,” he said. “We can’t afford to waste that time.”

  Mr. van Decken cursed under his breath, or tried to. The admiral heard him. “You have a problem with that, Mr. van Decken?” he said, perching on the edge of his desk and folding his arms. “Go ahead, speak your mind.”

  The first mate looked like a man being invited to stand up by the person who had just knocked him down with a punch. “I was only wondering if delay was worse than destruction.”

  “Delay! Do you hear that, Mr. Richter? My first mate thinks we have all the time in the world to accomplish our mission.” The admiral popped off his desk again and walked toward Bren, who tried not to shrink away. “I’m sure even a boy understands how an enterprise like this is run, don’t you, Master Owen? Obviously Mr. van Decken needs a reminder. The Dutch Bicycle and Tulip Company is financed by investors, like our Mr. Richter here. Investors expect a return on their investment, don’t they?” He looked at the company man, who nodded. “And a hefty investment it is. Ships take time and money to build. Crewmen have to be paid, fed, and outfitted. The ship has to be supplied amply enough to be at sea for months between ports. Are you adding all this up, Master Owen?

  “And what pays for this investment? Spices, jewels, fabric, and whatever else is in fashion back home. Or in this case, a legendary lost treasure hoard. The trick is, it has to be brought back first. You invest in me and I make sure you see returns before the year is out. That’s important to those who have put considerable financial assets at risk. In our business, delay is destruction.”

  But delay is better than dead, thought Bren. Isn’t it? Then he remembered the times he had avoided trouble with Duke, running from the bullies. And how good it felt to finally stand up to them. This was obviously much more serious, but Bren imagined that if he were the admiral of a great ship, he wouldn’t want to run from trouble either.

  “All we’ve got is a pair of falcon guns,” said Mr. van Decken, trying a different tack. “They’ve got heavy cannon fore and aft.”

  “I’m surprised at you!” said the admiral. “Have you so little faith in our ability to outwit a couple of olive-eaters?”

  Mr. van Decken walked over to the chart map as if to look for a third way. Mr. Richter, though, had found his tongue again: “What does he mean, destruction? Are we really going to square off against them?”

  “Square off? Hardly,” Admiral Bowman reassured him. “The problem with the Iberians is they captain their ships with generals instead of expert seamen. Big egos to go with their big boats. Yes, they have large cannon, but
what they really want to do is board the enemy’s ship and overpower them with an army. I don’t plan to let that happen.”

  “Sound strategy,” said Mr. van Decken. “But a better strategy still for the smaller man is to avoid a scrape altogether.”

  The admiral turned to his company man. “Mr. Richter, have I not convinced you? I serve at your pleasure, of course.”

  Mr. Richter poured himself more whisky, swirling the caramel spirit around the glass and then letting it settle, as if he were reading tea leaves. Finally he lifted his glass as if to make a toast and said, “Time is money.”

  “Good,” said the admiral. “That’s settled.”

  Over the next hour, the crew prepared the ship for battle, stowing loose equipment, furnishings, and anything else that could become a weapon if it went flying, both above and belowdecks. The main hatch was opened, and two falcon guns—small cannon mounted on wooden wheels—were hauled up from the cargo deck.

  The guns were small but still weighed several hundred pounds each, and it took many men to lift them and wheel them into position. Bren was determined to prove to the admiral that he didn’t need to be coddled, and threw his weight in with several others against the back of one of the guns, while another group pulled the gun forward with ropes. They were trying to position it at the front of the forecastle, near the bow of the ship. The rough wooden wheels creaked on their axles and moved stubbornly, fighting the men trying to turn them. It didn’t help that the deck sloped upward just slightly the closer you got to the ship’s prow.

  Suddenly one of the ropes on the front snapped, and the gun lurched backward. Bren slipped, knocked sideways by the men around him who were struggling to keep the gun steady. He fell backward, and watched in horror as the rear wheels rolled toward him.

  He froze, his ankle in the path of the careening wheel, but then someone grabbed him and pulled him away just before the cannon crushed his foot.

  It was Sean. “Go see what the admiral wants you to do,” he said, basically telling Bren he was of no use there.