by Ross King
'Gondomar,' I murmured.
'Precisely. Everyone knew how King James was under his influence. Gondomar ruled over him even more than did Buckingham-plain Sir George Villiers he was in those days, of course. And Gondomar was said to be most unhappy with Raleigh's charter. You see, he considered Raleigh nothing more than a privateer, like Drake. And soon there were rumours that Villiers was no longer so enthusiastic about the venture either. So it was that for eight months we expected to see Pett's carpenters throw down their tools, or else to wake up one morning to find that the Sidney had burnt to cinders on her keel blocks.'
A wind was stirring through the window, bringing with it a stink of brackish tide. I watched a herring-gull swoop past the raised sash, then a rocking mast from a pinnace tacking slowly upstream. Biddulph had fallen silent and the hammers in the timber-yard seemed louder than ever.
'But neither of those things happened,' I prompted him. 'The ship sailed.'
'Indeed she did.' Biddulph shifted the bulge of tobacco to the other cheek and shrugged. 'Greed prevailed over both fear and common sense, as it usually does. The money for fitting out the ship and paying her crew had already been raised through investors in the Royal Exchange, so fear and common sense would have made bankrupts of half of London. Ergo, in June of the year 1617 the Sidney sailed from London to join the rest of the fleet at Plymouth. I watched that too. I saw her cast off her anchors and ride down the Thames from Woolwich. I can still see the name painted in gilt on her escutcheon,' he said reflectively, then added: 'Peculiar name for a ship, is it not? That of a poet.'
'Yes,' I replied. 'Peculiar indeed.' It had already occurred to me that there might be a connection between the ship and one of the books of Hermetic philosophy I had dusted off a few days earlier, Giordano Bruno's Spaccio della bestia trionfante, an esoteric work that glorifies the religion of the ancient Egyptians. Bruno had dedicated his treatise to Sir Philip Sidney, who was not only a poet and courtier, but also a soldier who had died while fighting the Spaniards in the Low Countries.
'As I say, I watched her sail away on her maiden voyage,' Biddulph was continuing. 'But I knew it would be the last time I'd see her. I knew even then that the Sidney would never return to London.'
'Because of Gondomar?' I thought I knew this part of the story. As Raleigh left Plymouth a fleet of Spanish warships was rumoured to be setting sail from La Coruña. 'There were stories that the Spaniards aimed to intercept the fleet.'
'No, there was more than that.' He shifted about in his little chair, from which horsehair stuffing was burgeoning. 'At that time I was in a position to see the contract-books for the ship. I read everything to do not only with the fitting out and provisioning of the Sidney, but with the other ships as well. In those days I was responsible for preparing all contracts and letters to and from the Navy for signature and despatch. These documents had to do mainly with the purchase of stores and timber, with cordage and sails and so forth. A fleet of ships is like a herd of great ravening beasts, you understand. They have to be watered and provisioned, then scrubbed and groomed like prize racehorses and afterwards fitted out in canvas like fine ladies at their milliner's or dressmaker's. I also looked after all of the plans and models made by the shipwrights,' he finished, 'along with the contracts for their services.'
'And what was it that you learned from the contracts for the Philip Sidney?'
His face remained expressionless. 'I learned that her captain had no intention of voyaging up the waters of the Orinoco. You see, Mr. Inchbold, Captain Plessington's ship was different from the others in the fleet.'
I felt myself swallow. The rumbullion and the noise of the hammers were giving me a terrible headache. 'Different in what way?'
'The Sidney was a first-rate,' he explained. 'That meant she could carry a hundred guns or more. The Destiny was fitted with only thirty-six. So with such heavy cannon the Sidney needed a deep keel, of course, like most of our first-rates. That's why our warships are superior to those of the Dutch,' he added in a lower tone, as if fearful that a Dutch spy might be loitering beneath his crumbling eaves. 'That's why Cromwell was able to defeat the Dutch so soundly in '54. Their warships need shallow draughts so they can navigate their own coastal waters, and because they need shallow draughts they can't carry the same heavy cannon that we can. Ergo, we have much more firepower. With a couple of 32-pounders one of our first-rates can scatter their fleets like chaff. The Spaniards and their frigates, however… well, that's another matter entirely,' he added ruefully.
'But the Philip Sidney,' I prompted him again: 'her keel was deep?'
'Oh, indeed it was. She was a wonderful ship for slaughtering Dutchmen but a poor one for exploring rivers in Guiana. With so deep a draught she could never have navigated the waters of the Orinoco. You see, Mr. Inchbold, that was another strange thing about the voyage. I asked myself why Raleigh's fleet was due to arrive in Guiana in December or January, a time when navigation of the river is most difficult. To sail inland on the Orinoco you need a boat that draws only five or six feet of water, and in places you find that only on a flowing tide, even near the estuary. Even in the wet season. So in the month of January…'
'Yes,' I nodded, 'the dry season.' I tried to make sense of this information. 'But what if the guns were merely for protection? And what if the Philip Sidney was never intended to ascend the river in the first place? What if she was only meant to anchor off the coast? Sir Ambrose could easily have navigated the Orinoco in a shallop or another smaller boat.'
'True enough.' He shrugged his shoulders and then paused to void another jet of tobacco juice with the velocity of a Greenland whale spouting water. 'And his ship did indeed have a shallop lashed to her stern. But there were other things she did not have. You see, besides their casks of water and brined pork, the other ships were laden with all manner of digging and essaying equipment. Pickaxes, spades, barrows and trench-carts, quicksilver. The bills and contracts piled up in my office. Added to them were contracts for the soldiers and other crewmen, most of whom, it must be said, were villains who stank of either gaol or the bawdy-house, because the best seamen of London and Plymouth spurned the mission as folly.'
'But the Philip Sidney?'
Well, that was the oddest thing. There was, Biddulph explained, no essaying equipment on board the Philip Sidney, no mining or digging implements-nothing of the sort. Not that had been recorded at the Navy Office anyway. No contracts that had been sealed and stamped by the Assistant Clerk of the Acts. Only soldiers and guns, all arranged in what had seemed to the young Biddulph like the utmost secrecy. Also other items, sheaves of paper with tables and design-though he could not say what for precisely. He claimed to have no expertise in such matters. But all manner of complicated drawings and tables of mathematical calculations were involved in the construction and rigging of the Philip Sidney. A sign of those times, he claimed. Somewhere in the Navy Office was a book called Secret Inventions, Profitable and Necessary in These Days for a Defence of this Island, and withstanding of Strangers, Enemies of God's Truth and Religion. Its author, he explained, was a Scotsman named John Napier.
'You're not likely to find that volume on your shelves or anywhere else, for that matter, Mr. Inchbold. It's a confidential document. Very few copies were ever printed.'
'John Napier? I fear you've lost me. Was he not a mathematician?'
So he was, Biddulph admitted. A man of many parts, Napier was the first mathematician to make use of the decimal point, and in 1614 he made his greatest invention of all: logarithms. In those days, Biddulph explained, whole new worlds were opening up, not just in America and the South Seas, but in mathematics and astronomy as well. Men like Galileo and Kepler explored the heavens just as Magellan and Drake once explored the oceans. Through his telescope Galileo first saw the moons of Jupiter in 1610. By 1612 Kepler had counted 1,001 stars, over 200 more than Tycho Brahe. A few years earlier Kepler, a staunch Protestant, had interrupted his stargazing to calculate for Sir Walter Raleigh
the most efficient method of stacking cannon-balls on a gundeck. This new science, Biddulph explained, went hand in glove with exploration and wars over both gold and religion. Mathematicians and astronomers were at the service of kings and emperors. In Scotland, fearful of another Spanish Armada, of a Catholic invasion of the island, Napier had composed complex plans for his 'secret inventions', one of which was a gigantic mirror that would use the heat of the sun to burn enemy ships in the Channel. His logarithms were soon employed as an aid to navigation by Edward Wright, a scholar at Cambridge, the author of Certaine Errors in Navigation detected and corrected.
'War had become a sophisticated art,' Biddulph explained, 'waged through mysterious numbers and complex geometries. As was navigation. Francis Bacon was designing plans for better and larger merchantmen-vessels of 1,100 tons, with keels 115 feet in length and mainsails 75 feet in width. He was also experimenting with new methods of ordering and disposing tiers of sails for quicker trips across the ocean. There were even stories that Bacon himself designed the Sidney, which might have been the case for all I know. Like most people in those days, he grovelled before Villiers. If Villiers wanted a ship, Bacon would certainly have designed one. And he sold Villiers his house in the Strand, York House, when Villiers took a fancy to it. It's where Villiers proposed to keep all of the books and paintings he had begun collecting.'
'So what are you saying?' I managed to interject. 'That the Philip Sidney was armed with… I don't know… with one of Napier's giant mirrors?'
I was beginning to wonder if Biddulph's mind was not perhaps slipping after all. But then I remembered that Edward Wright's Certaine Errors in Navigation had also been on the list of books missing from Pontifex Hall, one of the volumes taken from the library along with The Labyrinth of the World.
'Of course not,' he replied evenly. 'I am merely explaining how the Philip Sidney appeared to have been equipped for tasks other than prospecting for gold along the Orinoco.'
'Which meant…?'
'Which meant nothing much in itself, perhaps. As you say, there were plenty of dangers to be found on the high seas. It would have been folly not to carry as many cannons as possible. But to understand the true purpose of the Sidney's voyage, you must understand how things stood in those days. I mean how things stood in both the Navy Office and the country at large.'
'Her true purpose?'
Biddulph paused. His eyes had closed and for a moment I thought he might have fallen asleep. I could feel myself begin to sweat and wheeze in the close little room. I was about to ask again, but his eyes suddenly opened and with a laborious grunt he pushed himself to his feet. The sleepy cat in the crook of his arm was blinking in the jaundiced beam of sunlight that had drifted round to the window.
'Yes. Her true purpose. But shall we take a short walk, Mr. Inchbold?' He was scratching the cat's ears and peering down at me, squinting in the pillar of light. 'I shall tell you all about it as we stroll. A perambulation, you see, sometimes refreshes a tired old brain.'
***
The tide had turned by the time we left the cottage, and most of the traffic in the Lower Pool was now bound for points downstream. Oars hissed and slapped in the water, canvas soughed in the breeze. We walked along the wharf in the direction of Shadwell, the sun warm on our shoulders. I had to struggle with my thorn-stick to keep up with Biddulph, who was spry as a goose. He slackened his pace only to pluck primroses from the water's edge, point out the odd landmark, or else to perform gallantries for the ladies of Wapping as they lumbered home from Smithfield Market with their suppers peeping from straw baskets. We walked as far as the Limehouse Stairs, almost a full mile. Only when we were returning to the cottage, squinting into the bright sun, did he resume his story.
The story, as Biddulph told it, seemed like one of the Revenge Plays so popular in the theatres of the time, something by John Webster or Thomas Kyd. There were court intrigues, shifting alliances, plots and counterplots, blood feuds, bribes both sexual and financial, even a poisoning-all performed with grisly relish by a cast of scheming bishops, sycophantic courtiers, Spanish spies and informers, corrupt officials, assassins, and a divorced countess with a spotted reputation.
Yes, I thought as we picked our way past the salt-glazed webs of fishermen's nets spread in the sun to dry: it would have made excellent theatre. On the one side was the War Party, led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, a staunch Calvinist spoiling for a war with the hated Spaniards. On the other was the Spanish Party, led by the aristocratic Howards, a family of wealthy crypto-Catholics who held sway over the King by means of their creature, a smooth-cheeked young Scotsman named Robert Carr, who had been created Earl of Somerset. Somerset was a spy for the Spaniards, turning over to Gondomar all correspondence between King James and his ambassadors. But in 1615 he had been disgraced when his new bride, a Howard, was accused of poisoning Sir Thomas Overbury, who opposed the marriage of the favourite to a woman whose infamy was remarkable even for those days. At a stroke both Gondomar and the Howards found themselves deprived of influence at court.
And it was at this point that a new character capered on to the stage, Sir George Villiers, another smooth-cheeked young man, who quickly replaced the imprisoned Somerset in the lecherous old King's affections. Villiers had been fostered and promoted by Archbishop Abbott, an inveterate enemy of the Howards. Among his numerous schemes the Archbishop planned to use Villiers to replace the Earl of Nottingham-yet another Howard-as Lord High Admiral. Once the hero of '88, Nottingham was by then a doddering octogenarian, the dupe of both his unscrupulous relatives and corrupt underlings in the Navy Office, to say nothing of the fact that he still received a handsome pension from the King of Spain.
'A new regime would begin with Villiers in the Navy Office,' Biddulph explained. 'No longer would our ships be the tools of the Howards and the Spanish Party. No longer would the Navy Office be a nest of thieves and informers, rotten with corruption from top to bottom. It would have a purpose once more. New and better ships would be built, and the Navy could begin to act as it had acted in the days of King Henry.'
But the situation was urgent, because at this point more characters began appearing on stage, couriers and messengers from all across Europe. All arrived at Lambeth Palace with enciphered papers and smuggled documents that brought dire news for the War Party. Not only had a Catholic League been formed in Germany to counteract the Protestant Union, but the Union itself was falling apart. It looked to the Abbott-Pembroke faction more and more as if the truce between the Dutch and Spaniards was about to be shattered by cannon-fire, as if new wars in the Low Countries were to be fought on the scarred old battlefields where Sidney gave his life thirty years earlier-wars for which England was neither ready nor, under James and the Spanish Party, willing. Worst of all, though, was a new report from Prague, delivered by a courier in red-and-gold De Quester livery, describing how a Habsburg, Ferdinand of Styria, was soon to be elected Holy Roman Emperor with the blessing of his cousin and brother-in-law, the King of Spain. Not only would Ferdinand use Spanish troops to restore Catholic magistracy anywhere in the Empire he might see fit, he would also revoke the Letter of Majesty granted by Rudolf II to the Protestants of Bohemia.
'So to men like Abbott and Pembroke, and also to Villiers, the purpose was clear. Protestantism was wavering as never before, Mr. Inchbold, not only in Europe but in England as well. King James had lost the support of the Puritans, who no longer believed that his reign would bring about a true reformation of the Church. There was a real danger of a schism, of the Church of England breaking apart or collapsing from within-and of Rome seizing the moment of chaos to regain its lost ground. Looking back, I believe that the publication in 1611 of the Authorised Version of the Holy Bible was intended to impose conformity on English congregations, but of course it achieved the opposite effect, because suddenly every coney-cutter and wool-comber in England was convinced that he could preach the word of God. Protestantism began breaking apart, parish by parish, into numero
us sects and separatist movements. So what was needed in 1617 was some masterstroke, a triumph, a daring strike at the heart of Spain's empire. Something that would unify the Protestants in their struggle against the twin powers of Rome and Madrid.'
I was stumbling along at his shoulder, attempting to follow these swirling currents and cross-currents as they flowed and receded, as they swept the Philip Sidney down the Thames to her secret destiny halfway round the world, among dense jungles and uncharted rivers, thousands of miles from competing factions and squabbling sectaries of England. I tripped on something, the fluke of a rusty anchor, and, righting myself, looked up to see London Bridge far in the distance, spread across the river behind the chimneystacks of Shadwell.
'The treasure fleet,' I whispered after a second, almost to myself.
'Exactly,' replied Biddulph. He had stopped walking and was gazing across the river towards Rotherhithe. 'Raleigh's ships were going in search of silver, not gold. That's why they were due to arrive in Tierra Firme in the dry season. Not so they could sail up the treacherous Orinoco in search of a gold mine that probably never existed in the first place, but to attack the annual silver fleet that was due to sail from Guayaquil to Seville. The whole fleet was probably worth as much as ten or twelve million pesos. Quite a sum-one that would pay for an army of mercenaries for the Palatinate or the Netherlands, or wherever else they might be needed.'
