The Vanishing Island

by Barry Wolverton

  “You’re not still worried the men will think you’re coddling me?”

  “I can’t worry about that now,” said the admiral. “Besides, most of the men barely know you exist, and the ones that do already have little respect for you.”

  “Oh,” said Bren. “Okay.”

  “Good. You start now. Catch up to Mouse and help him bring our victory feast.”

  “Aye, sir,” said Bren, who despite himself felt his head swelling from the trust the admiral was placing in him. After a choppy start, he finally felt he might belong here.

  Mouse was still in the galley, waiting for Cook, who was preparing both breakfast and lunch. The small kitchen reeked of dried herring, and Cook was using a large wooden pestle to mash a pile of root vegetables into a dish the Dutch called stamp-pot. When Mouse and Bren walked up to him, he put down the pestle and picked up a butcher knife.

  “Watch your hands,” he said, cleaving a slab of porknokker in half. “And that’s what’s in store for you,” he added, waving the knife at Mouse, “if I catch you sneaking in or out of the hold.”

  “Me?” said Mouse.

  Bang! went the cleaver again, causing Bren to jump. He knew that plenty of seamen were ex-criminals. He wondered if Cook had been an ax-murderer.

  “Waffles and coffee are ready,” he said, nodding at the trays. “Be gone.”

  “Sorry if I got you in trouble,” said Bren as they took breakfast back to the officers’ saloon. He assumed Cook had seen them when they went looking for the paiza. There was a good reason the hold was kept locked. All the food and drink was kept below, and their supplies had to last at least until they reached Cape Colony.

  “I go down there all the time,” said Mouse.

  “Was I imagining things?” said Bren. “I mean, you did pick the lock?”

  The boy said nothing at first, then: “Where I come from I had to learn to do things to survive. And Admiral Bowman knows, in case you’re wondering. He needs me to help him . . . find things sometimes.”

  Bren remembered the sense of being followed back in Map. And then the break-in at Black’s . . .

  But he decided it wasn’t his place to pry. Instead he asked, “Where are you from?”

  “China,” said Mouse, which nearly made Bren drop his tray. He knew no one was allowed into China, and he had assumed no one was allowed out, either. Suddenly Bren wanted the ship to be ten times as long, so they could have more time to talk, but they had reached the caboose.

  He helped deliver breakfast but then joined his old mess one last time in the crew’s saloon, hungrier than he had been in a while. Nearly getting blown to bits had given him an appetite—and a greater appreciation for ship’s food. But once he sat down to eat, he barely tasted his food. He could tell there were men missing from the table, injured or dead. No one was much for celebrating.

  Otto was there, unfortunately, hunkered over his plate and cramming his mouth with syrupy waffle and pork, staring at Bren with his black eyes. He knew what Otto was thinking—Bren was a coward, he’d seen him running away from battle; he was nothing but another mouth to feed; even Mouse could move powder and cut fuses.

  In his mind, Bren argued back: I saved the ship! I don’t know how but I’m sure I did! He could just imagine Otto’s reaction to such a claim. Bren had hoped he’d left bullies like Duke behind, that on a ship all men pulled together toward a common goal and a common destination. But he knew that meant he had to learn to pull his own weight, or he would deserve every ounce of scorn Otto could heap on him.

  On deck, men were replacing cannonball-shaped gaps in the decking and railings, repairing damaged sails, checking for frayed ropes and replacing as necessary. Most important, the mainmast had been restored to its full height. Where once it had been a single wooden column, it was now three sections pinned and lashed together.

  Sean led Bren to the quarterdeck, and then up again to the poop deck, where they found Mr. Tybert leaning over the rail as if he were puking. When he stood back up Bren saw that he had a spool in his hands, with a line of rope running out into the water.

  “Mr. Tybert, your apprentice,” said Sean. “Treat him well.”

  Mr. Tybert gave him an unfriendly look, but Bren had decided that was the only look he had. When Bren didn’t move, he looked up and said, “You’re not going to learn anything standing over there, jongen.”

  Bren cautiously approached. The navigator’s surroundings could have been mistaken for the contents of a child’s game room, or perhaps a magician’s props—a large trunk next to the cage of birds, various wooden tools that looked like spinning tops and building blocks, and, leaning against the rail, what appeared to be a dartboard.

  Mr. Tybert unfolded a bare map of the Atlantic that was crisscrossed with straight lines and spread it out on the lid of the trunk. He then removed a small folding knife from his boot, released the blade, and stabbed the top left corner of the map to keep it from blowing away. He held down the opposite corner with his hand.

  “Easiest way to get anywhere is hug the coastline. We sailed almost due south from Map till we sighted the north coast of the Iberian Peninsula, then angled away like so,” he said, tracing the border of Spain and then Portugal. “But sailing along an unfriendly border has its pitfalls, as should be plain enough by now.”

  “And taking too wide a path would cost us too much time,” said Bren.

  “Admiral Bowman made that clear, did he? Well, it’s more than that. Sailing into open sea requires being able to calculate our longitude—how far east or west we are. Latitude is easy,” he said, holding up a wooden instrument that looked sort of like a crossbow. He demonstrated how you stood with your back to the sun, aligning the sun’s shadow with the horizon and reading the angle.

  “Used to have to do this looking square at the sun,” said the navigator. “Was called a Jacob’s staff. My very first instrument from my first ship. Still have it. Many a navigator went blind usin’ the thing. Lucky for me I was still young when the backstaff came along.”

  So that didn’t explain his missing eye.

  “Just figure the sun’s distance above the horizon at noon with our backstaff here and it’s straight mathematics from there. I can always tell where we are north and south on the map. But east-west? Hope and pray, jongen, hope and pray.”

  He gazed off toward the horizon, as if something were weighing on his mind.

  “I don’t understand why one is so easy and the other so difficult,” said Bren.

  “Because latitude is fixed by God, boy. The sun, the moon, and the stars told our ancients where the equator was, and the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Longitude shifts with the sands in my glass,” he said, nodding at the hourglass he used to mark noon each day. “You calculate longitude by measuring time, and it’s a canker telling time on a ship. Instead we make rough measurements using the traverse board over there.” He pointed to the thing that looked like a dartboard. “Estimate how far east and west we’ve gone based on our speed and direction. It’s called dead reckoning.”

  “I see,” said Bren, but he really didn’t.

  “Problem is, you have to keep careful track of your position each and every step of the way.”

  Bren thought about it for a minute, while the navigator stared out to sea again. “Mr. Tybert, is something wrong?”

  The navigator turned his head enough to look at Bren with his good eye.

  “Something happened at the end of that battle,” he said, “and now I have no idea where we are.”

  CHAPTER

  18

  THE STORY OF MOUSE

  “I assume we’re still in the Atlantic?” said the admiral.

  “I couldn’t tell you for sure,” said Mr. Tybert. “I’ve taken my measures two days running now, and all I know is that based on the ship’s speed, we should be thirty-four degrees north, give or take—about two days south of Portugal. Instead we’re approaching the Barbary Islands.”

  “Which are where?” said the ad
miral.

  “Seventeen degrees north,” said Mr. Tybert. “More than a thousand miles off.”

  Bren was dying for the admiral to look at him, to see if they were thinking the same thing, but the admiral kept his gaze fixed on the navigator.

  “So if you’ve lost track, your dead reckoning is hopelessly off.”

  “Aye, sir. I’ve no idea which direction we went to get this far south, nor how fast we went. It’s like I fell asleep for two weeks. Except I didn’t.”

  The admiral thought about all he’d just heard, stroking his beard over and over. He stood up and called the navigator over to his charting map. “We did sail through a storm north of Iberia,” he said, pointing to the map. “And you know as well as I do how easy it is to lose track of things in the middle of a battle.”

  Mr. Tybert said nothing. He just leaned on the map table with both hands, as if waiting for a better explanation to reveal itself.

  “Look at it this way,” said Admiral Bowman. “If we traveled due south of where we engaged the Iberians, we would have hit the coast of North Africa, correct?”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “So let’s assume we were on our planned southwesterly course, and go from there.”

  “And hope we don’t run head-on into a bump of land we didn’t see coming,” said Mr. Tybert.

  “I shall pray on it hourly,” said the admiral.

  As the navigator turned to go, the admiral added, “And Mr. Tybert, not a word to the crew about our being . . . temporarily dislocated.” Mr. Tybert nodded, passing Mouse as he left, who was bringing tea into the cabin.

  “I guess we have our answer,” said the admiral, looking squarely at Bren. “About which one of us up and vanished. Any theories as to what happened?”

  Bren’s face grew hot, and he reached up to touch the paiza. Just a day ago he had felt like a hero, and now he wondered if he had somehow put them in even more danger.

  “No, sir.”

  The admiral turned to Mouse. “It would appear someone’s thrown a wooden shoe into our loom,” he said. “We may be off course. I was wondering if you could divine which way the birds are flying?”

  “I’ll try,” said Mouse, and when he had left, the admiral noticed the puzzled expression on Bren’s face. “It’s one of the very wonderful things about our ship’s boy,” he explained. “Mouse can talk to animals.”

  “Really?” said Bren, who remembered the way the men had made fun of Mouse for talking to him. For having “neither fur nor feathers.” That also explained the cage of birds on the poop deck, he assumed.

  “Of course, having a gift is one thing,” said the admiral, who came nearly nose-to-nose with Bren. He gently lifted the lanyard off Bren’s chest with his open hand, and then squeezed his fist, causing the leather strap to tighten around Bren’s neck. “Knowing what to do with it is something else entirely.”

  Mr. Tybert cast a chip log into the water—a weighted piece of wood attached to a line that had knots spaced evenly along its length. He then counted out the number of knots on the log line that spooled out over a half-minute period. He did this three times, to be as accurate as possible. This was how he calculated the ship’s speed.

  “Four and a half knots,” he said, and then, after studying his compass, “South-southwest, forty-three degrees.”

  Bren went to the traverse board. The top part was a circle, painted with the compass rose, the face of which was covered with holes drilled at each point in the compass. The bottom part was a rectangle with another row of holes. Bren placed one peg in the top part, to record their direction, and a second peg in the bottom to record their speed.

  “We do this every hour for four hours, until the board is full,” said the navigator. “Then we can dead reckon how far east or west we’ve sailed from the previous measurement.”

  “That seems simple enough,” said Bren, at which point the navigator cuffed him on the ear.

  “Ow!”

  “Simple, jongen? Simple to figure the wind and the waves, that can throw you off by hundreds of miles over a voyage this long? And that’s if you haven’t already lost track of a thousand miles!”

  “Sorry,” said Bren, his ear full of bees.

  Mr. Tybert slammed his fist down on the locker, causing Bren and the birds to jump. “All that poppycock about the storm and the battle, like I’m some silly little brugpieper. A navigator worth his salt never makes assumptions, jongen. But I reckon we don’t have much choice.”

  Bren decided not to talk for a while, to let Mr. Tybert calm down. The navigator would figure it out . . . he had to. This was the Dutch Bicycle & Tulip Company. Their ships didn’t just get lost. Not when the treasure of Marco Polo was waiting to be found. This horrible thought of missing out on the greatest treasure hoard of all time immediately made Bren forget his vow of silence.

  “Mr. Tybert, the admiral asked Mouse to ask the birds where we are. Do you believe he can talk to animals?”

  The navigator gave Bren a look that told him he should guard his other ear. But instead of raising his hand, he said, “I believe a sailor will believe anything if he thinks it’ll get him home safe. I’ve known a captain to carry a wounded dog aboard his ship, leaving a man back home with the dog’s bloody bandages to dip in sympathy powder every day at noon. That way when the dog yelps on the ship they know it’s noon back home, and they can calculate longitude that way.”

  “Did it work?” said Bren.

  “If he ever gets back, we’ll ask him,” said Mr. Tybert. “That was fourteen years ago and no one’s seen him since.”

  Bren looked at the map again. He noticed the navigator had circled several locations in the Indian Ocean. “What are these?”

  “Possible locations for your so-called vanishing island,” he said. “Guesswork, mostly. The admiral has been studying the history of the East for many years, picking up clues to routes the old-timers may have sailed, combined with what history has told us about favorable trade winds and the like.”

  So-called vanishing island? “Mr. Tybert, are you not a believer? In the lost treasure story, I mean.”

  The navigator sized him up, as if he were trying to decide whether Bren was a mole for the admiral.

  “I believe in treasure, all right, jongen. I’ve been a navigator for the company now a dozen years, and every trip we come back with a cargo hold of treasure. Every island in the Far East is a treasure island, far as I can tell. Makes me wonder why we’d go lookin’ for one that might not even exist.”

  “But now we have a map,” said Bren.

  “A coded map,” Mr. Tybert reminded him. “But that’s just between us and the birds, remember.”

  Bren thought about it. “So we’ll just stay at Cape Colony until we’ve figured it out, if we haven’t by then.”

  Mr. Tybert scowled at him. “There you go making assumptions,” he said. “What did I tell you about that? We’re God-knows-where in the Atlantic, and you’ve already got us in Cape Colony, sippin’ tea with the Dutch governor.”

  Bren blushed.

  “Aside from that, the winds are rarely friendly near the equator. It ain’t writ on maps, but we call this whole region the Sluggish Sea,” said Mr. Tybert, pointing out a large swath in the middle of the Atlantic. “Can grind a ship to a halt like quicksand.”

  Bren didn’t want to argue, but he had seen “The Sluggish Sea” written on many old maps at Rand McNally’s. Early sailors always came up with better names for places: the Sea of Atlas (the north Atlantic), the Sea of Gems (the Indian Ocean), Ocean’s End (the Arctic Circle). He was just now beginning to realize how long he would go without setting foot on land, confined to quarters the size of a coffin, with the same terrible men and the same terrible food and the same terrible duties every day. And that was assuming they weren’t really lost. How his father and Mr. Black would love to know that Bren’s only discovery to date was that ship’s life wasn’t as thrilling as he’d imagined, even in its most thrilling moments.

 
Part of him wished he could admit it to them, face-to-face.

  That night Bren went to his old hammock before remembering he was now sleeping in the caboose.

  “Master Owen is first class,” chided one crewman. “I hear they give you silk robes and slippers back there.”

  “And cocoa and sweets,” mocked another.

  “I’m just sharing a cabin with Mouse,” Bren protested, but it didn’t stop the men from sending him off with two earfuls of insults.

  He soon discovered that calling his cabin a cabin was a stretch. It was more like a mop closet, with the two cots set at right angles to each other, and one tiny desk with a small lantern. But Bren wouldn’t take all that in until later. The first thing he saw when he opened the door was Mouse, who apparently was changing for bed. And the first thing he noticed was that the ship’s boy wasn’t really a boy.

  “I wasn’t . . . I didn’t mean to . . . ,” Bren started to say, but words utterly failed him. He snuffed the lantern, as if that would make everything go back to the way it was.

  Mouse relit the lantern. She had a nightshirt on now.

  “Does anyone . . . are you . . .” Bren still couldn’t put a single thought together.

  “The admiral knows,” said Mouse. “He said it’s best to keep it a secret, on a ship like this.”

  Mouse got in bed, and Bren began to undress to do the same. He paused halfway, snuffed their lantern, and then finished.

  “Don’t worry,” said Mouse. “I won’t look.”

  “The admiral must’ve known I’d find out, bunking with you,” said Bren.

  “I think he trusts you,” said Mouse. “I do, too. You saved me from those boys in Map.”

  Bren said nothing. He didn’t want to explain that he had been more interested in hurting Duke than saving some orphan.