Grantville Gazette Volume 25

by editor Paula Goodlett

  The clerk started to look offended, but Captain Waddle laughed, then nodded. "Mapmakers have always guessed, Mr. Toot. A worthwhile thing to remember."

  "Granted, Captain. But the up-timers maps and records make the guesses much better. Using this technique, we have chart books of greater accuracy than can be found outside the Ring of Fire and greater detail than can be found inside it." Then the clerk looked Jeremy up and down. "A likely lad. Perhaps he would like to examine the more general references we have from the Ring of Fire while we talk."

  It was clear even to Jeremy that he was being gotten rid of while the clerk tried to make a sale. But the captain nodded and waved Jeremy over to the general knowledge section.

  It was in the general reference section that Jeremy found A Compilation of Useful Up-timer Knowledge Gleaned from the Encyclopedias and the Mother Earth Booklets. It was in English because the author—transcriber might have been a better word—had rushed to print without taking the time to translate, apparently in an attempt to get there first with the most. Considering that there were several copies gathering dust in a back corner, it seemed likely that it was a less than astute business decision.

  Jeremy paged through the books. The print face was uninspired and the spelling was atrocious, but he was used to variations in spelling and if the print face was dull, it was quite legible. And there were quite a few pictures and diagrams. It occurred to Jeremy that these books would probably sell rather better in London than in Hamburg. There were designs for irrigation systems, wash boards, tillers, all manner of things. Jeremy found himself caught up in a discussion of hydraulics.

  When Captain Waddle and the clerk had finished their business, Jeremy showed the captain the books he had been reading. And whispered that they would probably be worth more in England than here, "because at least we can read them." The problem was that they weren't headed for England. Still, the captain let Jeremy buy one copy of the set.

  * * *

  "You, boy!" Captain Waddle shouted. "You, ah, Perkins, isn't it?"

  A scruffy ship's boy with brown hair that looked like a haystack ran over. Captain Waddle handed him the bag he was carrying. "Take this to my quarters. Toot, you help him. That bag is heavy."

  As soon as Captain Waddle turned away, Perkins sneered. "Don't need any help, Mister Toot. You gwan back to your books and figures, why don't you?"

  "Because I'm under the captain's orders just as much as you are," Jeremy said. "And I'll not be wanting to get my rear end kicked up around my ears anymore than you do."

  Perkins just snorted and Jeremy didn't know what to do. His rank was sort of higher than the ship's boy's, but only sort of. A hundred years later, even fifty years later, when midshipman had become an official rank of the Royal Navy he would have put Perkins in his place. Fifty years earlier there would have been no distinction; he would have been just another ship's boy. Jeremy had no way of knowing that he was caught in the middle of making a tradition. So he helped Perkins carry the load to the captain's quarters. Then collected his books and went back to his place amidships.

  * * *

  Bob Perkins wiped the sweat from his eyes. It was hot in the hold. They were stowing pallets of copper plate. Which Bob had heard wasn't what the captain had wanted. It wasn't that there wasn't stuff from that Grantville place in Hamburg. Just not enough of it. Perkins had seen the weirdest stuff and you could buy it. Well, Bob Perkins couldn't, not on a ship's boy's pay. But all the officers and most of the Middies had bought something or other. There just wasn't enough to fill a hold. So they were shipping copper plate. Which First Mate had said was little better than shipping ballast. Some better because they could get a fair price for copper in the Indies but nothing like they would have got for a load of electrics, steam motors, or pumps. The bos'n said they had gotten the copper plate at a bargain price because there was some new process for making it and they'd made too much of it.

  Perkins looked up at Mr. Jeremy Toot standing by the bos'n while the bos'n told him how the pallets were to be distributed to keep the weight of the ship evenly balanced. No heavy lifting for the midship boys. Stuck up little snots.

  * * *

  From Hamburg, they sailed northwest around the British isles, threading the needle between Far Isle and the southern tip of the Shetlands. Then south/southwest for the Azores, all the while avoiding the sight of land, partly as a test of the new navigation equipment, and partly to avoid the channel pirates. They didn't quite manage to avoid all sight of land. The lookout saw Far Isle, though it wasn't visible from the poop deck. But they did hit Ponta Delgada dead on. They reprovisioned at Ponta Delgada and used the northern trades to take them southwest to the equator. They made it slowly through the doldrums to the southeast trades, where they ran into a storm. It wasn't a hurricane. All the officers were sure of that, because hurricanes didn't happen in the south Atlantic.

  * * *

  "Damn it all, boy!" Second Mate Franklin Burnside screamed over the storm. "You blasted lubber, you did that on purpose."

  The "that" in question was Midshipman Jeremy Toot's last meal, which had heartily offended his stomach and been forcefully ejected from it. Jeremy was convinced that had the meal returned to the bowl it had started from no one could have told the difference. Disgusting going in and only slightly more disgusting coming out. However, Jeremy's aim was lacking. The former contents of his stomach were now decorating Lieutenant Burnside's left boot and trouser leg. The leg that had been sticking out from the table. Vomiting on the lieutenant's boot and pants hadn't been intentional, not even the aim, though Jeremy privately felt the outcome was just. Lieutenant Burnside, among his other faults, had an iron stomach and enjoyed showing it off.

  The ship heaved again but this time Jeremy managed not to. The storm had lasted for the past two days. It was the worst pounding the ship had taken since he had been consigned to it.

  Burnside raised a fist and Jeremy tensed but didn't flinch. He had learned that flinching or cowering didn't help, and any show of defiance brought utter disaster. But this time all Burnside did was shove him away. "Get on deck, mama's boy. Maybe we'll get lucky and the storm will take you."

  Jeremy made his way on deck with considerable difficulty, where he was put to work under the bos'n. For two more days, he and the rest of the crew worked the ship out of the hurricane's influence, on little food and less sleep. They survived, but not intact.

  * * *

  "Have a look over there, Mr. Toot. You, too, Perkins," the bos'n said.

  Jeremy squeezed around the barrels and bundles in the hold, Perkins following resentfully. Jeremy didn't know what the ship's boy had against him. They were in the same boat after all.

  Being bookish on the Hazard had not made life pleasant for Jeremy. While navigation and the keeping of accounts was held in high regard, reading for enjoyment and doing maths not needed for accounts or navigation was considered decidedly odd. Not exactly effeminate, but snooty. Jeremy, whose reading was better than Mr. Burnside's, had been assigned to teach basic reading and math to the ship's boys, relieving Mr. Wesley of that duty. And Perkins was doing pretty well. He certainly worked hard enough at it. But every time Jeremy had to correct him, he could almost feel Perkins grinding his teeth.

  "Well, now. Isn't that a mess?"

  Jeremy gulped. This did not bode well for the ship.

  Bos'n Garry Jordan shook his head. "A right mess." He looked over at Jeremy. "Ah, now. Come along. Best to get the bad news and make what we can of what's left."

  "Aye, Bos'n." Bos'n Jordan was a hefty fellow, strong as an ox. He heaved aside one of the broken water barrels. Jeremy did his best to help, but he was slight compared to Bos'n Jordan. "How bad do you think?"

  Jordan had picked his way to the barrels that hadn't overturned and smashed. "'Tisn't good. Not good at all. See here?" He held up the end of the rope that usually helped hold the barrels in place. "Frayed. The storm will have finished it off."

  They continued to pick the
ir way through the destruction in the holds. Jeremy noted that many of the barrels that hadn't broken were sprung at the seams and leaking. Worse, when they opened a cask, the water tasted of salt. The bilge water had seeped in to the barrel.

  "Bos'n!" That was Perkins, on the other side of the hold. "Come see!"

  * * *

  "It's nah so bad, lads." Bos'n Jordan clapped Jeremy and Perkins on their backs. "Old Cookie, he can use the saltier water in the porridge. 'Snah like we're not used to salt, after all."

  Jeremy shook off his shock. He was a midshipman, after all. "I'm sure we'll manage, Bos'n." He paused a moment. "Well, I'd best report to the captain."

  There was enough water for about three weeks. With the Hazard in the condition the storm had left it, they were at least five weeks from any known land. If they got rain—enough rain—they might make it. But it didn't look good. Sailing ships didn't follow the shortest routes; they followed the best winds. They were in the mid-Atlantic, actually closer to the Americas, but when the storm let them loose they were at thirty-three degrees south in the Horse latitudes closer to where the southern westerlies blew from west to east. The closest place in terms of travel time was Africa.

  * * *

  The second mate, Lieutenant Burnside, stared down his long, long nose. "So, Toot, just what is our status?"

  "Forty-eight barrels, sir." Jeremy Toot didn't want to give this report. "And fifteen of those are iffy. The bos'n said we might have to use them anyway."

  "Not good. Not good at all."

  "No, sir. But there's worse, I'm afraid."

  "Well, don't just stand there, Toot." Burnside stood and tried to tower over Jeremy, although he wasn't really tall enough for the full effect. Jeremy wasn't all that short. "What else?"

  "It's the beer, sir. The beer barrels are all empty and broken. The ropes broke. So, it's water or nothing . . . and soon enough, it will be nothing."

  * * *

  "Perhaps if we head west?" Lieutenant Burnside set down his mug and looked up at Captain Erasmus Waddle. "Turn north and catch the trades. We're closer to land westward."

  Captain Waddle shook his head sadly. "Not much closer, not much at all. And I don't want us stuck in the Horse any more than we can avoid." He took a sip of his own water ration, which had been topped off with a bit of his private stock of rum. "We're best to continue as we are, I'm afraid. If we keep the men busy, they won't have time to worry and fret."

  "Well, then." Burnside stood up and fetched a map the captain pointed out. "We're here, by this morning's sighting." He studied it for a moment. "If we sail southeast we should get into the westerlies and fetch up in southern Africa. That's if we can ever get free of the Horse." The Horse latitudes were a high pressure zone extending from roughly thirty to thirty-five degrees where the winds didn't blow well or consistently.

  Waddle worked out some figures. "Yes. I wish we were a bit further south, but if the wind cooperates, we may make it."

  Burnside nodded. The winds were not being especially cooperative. Since the storm, they'd died down to light breezes. The ship wasn't moving quickly at all.

  * * *

  "The Hazard is owned in part by Captain Waddle," Jeremy explained to the ship's boys. "I understand he did quite well while serving the British East India Company. And the rest is owned by a cabal of investors." Including Jeremy's father but Jeremy didn't mention that part. "She was bought at auction, refurbished, refitted and renamed. Originally built for the often hostile eastern trade, she's five hundred tons and carries twenty guns."

  The guns meant that the Hazard carried a larger crew than might normally be expected of a merchantman. More crew meant more provisions which decreased her cargo. Jeremy didn't mention that either. He didn't want to remind the boys that they were low on the most vital provision—water. "The truth is that the Hazard is halfway to being a smuggler and a quarter of the way to being a pirate. Which was perfectly clear to anyone in Spithead that cared about such things. What they couldn't tell, from her provisioning was where she's going to do her smuggling." Jeremy kicked himself mentally. He shouldn't have mentioned the provisioning. The main reason for the second hour of classes each day was to keep them occupied and keep their minds off the lack of water.

  "Navigation," Jeremy rushed on, "that let's us stay out of sight of land and hopefully other ships is important to the captain's plans once we reach the Indies. He hopes to be able to contact friends he made there without the factors of the East India Company ever being the wiser. We can buy a load of spices and sell them in Spain or Scotland and all have a major bonus." Which was another reason that Captain Waddle had been willing to try the new navigation gear they had bought in Hamburg. And why Jeremy had—with an advance on his wages—gotten a three book set in English, sort of, called A Compilation of Useful Up-timer Knowledge Gleaned from the Encyclopedias and the Mother Earth Booklets. Jeremy didn't know what a Mother Earth Booklet was. He had no way of knowing about Mother Earth News magazine, which described its version of how to live in harmony with nature, and which had been quite useful to the up-timers in making their cheat sheets. Nor did he care all that much. What he cared about was the information contained in his book set on subjects as diverse as food preservation and solar water heating. Information he could get back to as soon as class was over. He loved those books. They had made much of the trip since Hamburg more pleasant.

  So why not use them?

  * * *

  Bob Perkins kept his mouth shut with an effort as Mr. Toot went and got his silly books. Showing off his education as usual. Yet Bob found himself interested as a simple solar oven was described. A situation not to be borne.

  "It might work like it says," Bob said. "But where on earth would you get mirrors that big, is what I want to know. Or a glass container big enough?"

  "That's a good point, Perkins," Mr. Toot said. Bob hated it when Mr. Toot said things like that. He always sounded so bleedin' pleased, almost surprised. Like his half-trained dog had just fetched him a stick. The truth was that Jeremy Toot was pleased, honestly pleased, to have provided knowledge to a fellow human being. Bob Perkins was unprepared to admit that even to himself. Especially now when he was scared that they were all going to die when they ran out of water.

  "The directions for the 'simple solar oven' are indeed simple enough," Mr. Toot continued. Then, checking the books title page, "For an . . . up-timer, but as Perkins points out, simple isn't the same as practical. Not that Cookie being able to cook without fire wouldn't be a good thing. It would be a saving on wood, assuming you had sunshine, of course and more importantly, open flame on shipboard is dangerous. Still I imagine the directions for making a solid gold chamber pot are as simple. They probably start with 'buy five pounds of gold' and I think we'd all find better uses for five pounds of gold than making it into a chamber pot."

  Bob snorted in spite of himself. "So, does your book have a way to turn salt water into fresh?" he asked, almost congenially.

  Mr. Toot froze as if he'd been struck by lightning. Then he was running his finger up and down the contents listing in the first book, mumbling like a madman and all the other boys looked at Bob as though asking what he'd done to Mr. Toot.

  Mr. Toot stopped only his eyes moving back and forth. "Solar distillation. How to distill water using the sun. Book two, page one forty-three," he said. Then he grabbed the second book and was flipping through the pages.

  All the boys knew what distill meant. It was what you did to make rum, scotch and brandy. Which was all they knew about it. But in Bob's mind a light went on. If you could distill the spirits out of mash to make rum, could you distill the salt out of water to make fresh water? Now, that was something they could use. And Bob was caught by conflicting emotions. If there was such a device, they might all be saved and that was a good thing. But their saving would come out of Mr. Toot's bloody useless book and that was very definitely a bad thing. While Bob was balancing dying a slow and painful death on the one hand and having Mr
. Toot be their bloody savior on the other, Mr. Toot had been reading through the article.

  "Damn it to bloody hell!" Bob heard Mr. Toot's curse with disappointment not unmixed with relief. "They do have a solar distiller for making fresh—what they call distilled water," Mr. Toot continued with a defeated air. "It will work on salt water. According to the book, it will even work on piss. Unfortunately, it's like the solar oven or the solid gold chamber pot. It requires glass and quite a bit of it to make it work."

  Almost against his will, Bob said, "Well, maybe if you put that one together with something else in there, you might have something that would work. 'Sides there is some glass on board. The captain's wife made him buy them big glass winders for the captains cabin." Most ships had glass windows, made from little bitty bits of glass held together with lead. But the captain's cabin on the Hazard had bigger squares of glass held together with wood. The captain's wife had insisted over the objections of everyone else and paid for them. Being the younger daughter of a baronet, she got her way.

  * * *

  Jeremy followed Perkin's advice after dismissing the class to other duties. He didn't have to look that far. The solar water heater was only a couple of articles over and it mentioned that while the glass and reflectors made it more efficient it would work without it. Black pipes were all you needed. But there was a problem that Jeremy didn't even know was there. What he had wasn't a book on thermodynamic theory. It was a how-to book. Long on what, but really short on why. The picture showed the water flowing through the pipes getting hotter. And it mentioned in passing that the reason the solar water heaters worked was because hot water rose. That was enough for Jeremy to guess that if they put their small solar still on top of a solar hot water heater, it ought to work just fine. Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately—the book didn't mention the heat of vaporization in the bits Jeremy was reading. Five hundred and thirty-nine calories per gram would only have depressed him.