by Ross King
We had begun walking again, more slowly now, our hat brims pulled low against the sun. I tried to comprehend everything he now began telling me: that Raleigh's fleet was funded by desperate German princes poised on the brink of war, by Prince Maurice of Nassau, by English merchants hoping to expand their trade in Spanish America, as well as by assorted Calvinists in both England and Holland, all dreaming of a war of religion with the Spaniards, of driving Catholics from England, the Low Countries and the Empire in the same way that King Philip had driven hundreds of thousands of Moriscos from Spain only two or three years earlier.
'The capture of the fleet-or even its sinking-would also have sent ripples to every part of the Empire, every corner of the Catholic world. No Spanish fleet had been touched since the capture of the Madre de Dios in 1592. Even Drake'-he had turned round and was gesturing into the distance, across the river, with his stick, to where the Golden Hind sat in her dry-dock at Deptford-'even Drake had failed in his attempt to capture it in '96.'
Such was the bold plan, then. Led by the Philip Sidney, the fleet was to violate Raleigh's charter in the most spectacular fashion by attacking the annual convoy as it sailed from Nombre de Dios. The War Party believed that James would refuse to invoke the death clause in Raleigh's charter, not merely because Villiers and his faction would control the Navy Office as well as the court, nor even because Gondomar's influence would be waning as a result. The clause would not be invoked for the simple reason that-according to another clause in the charter-the greedy old King, the greatest spendthrift in Europe, was due to receive for his personal enjoyment one-fifth of whatever Raleigh might bring back in the holds of his ships: one-fifth of the treasures from the wealthiest convoy on earth.
But things went awry even before the fleet left Plymouth. Biddulph blamed the disaster not on the elements, not on ill fortune or poor planning, but on the Spanish spies and informers who infested Whitehall Palace and the Navy Office. It was known from documents smuggled out of Madrid that one of Gondomar's informers held an important post in the Navy Office, someone codenamed 'El Cid', or 'The Lord', which led Biddulph to believe that it was old Nottingham himself. So perhaps the silver fleet had been alerted to the danger well in advance. Perhaps it remained in Peru, in the harbour at Guayaquil. Or it could have sailed south, round Cape Horn, whose windy straits the Spaniards still controlled despite the recent depredations of the Dutch. Whatever the case, in the end Raleigh's fleet sailed towards the Orinoco instead of the promised riches of Nombre de Dios.
At this point in the voyage Biddulph was seeing Spanish agents and plotters everywhere. The so-called unprovoked attack on San Tomás by Raleigh's men was actually, he claimed, a clever plot aimed at discrediting the voyage in the eyes of King James, a well-planned conspiracy on the part of Gondomar's agents provocateurs, some of them on board Raleigh's ships, others stationed in San Tomás itself. Far from being fearful of an attack on a Spanish settlement in Guiana, Gondomar and the Spanish Party welcomed it, indeed provoked it. There was little for Raleigh to gain in Guiana and everything for him to lose, not least his head. Even more important, Villiers, Abbott and the whole War Party itself would be disgraced by the episode, while the Howards, Gondomar's bien intencionados, would once more be in the command of both the Navy Office and the King of England.
'But what became of the Philip Sidney after the fleet broke up?' I asked, wondering again how much of Biddulph's version-this tale of plots and counterplots-I should let myself believe. 'Captain Plessington wasn't in the party that raided San Tomás. Not that I've been able to discover.'
'And I doubt you will ever discover what Captain Plessington did,' Biddulph replied. 'Not even Bacon's inquiry could sort through all of the details. Nor, I believe, was it intended to,' he added with a sombre chuckle. 'The official story, of course, is that after the raid on San Tomás the fleet dispersed. It's known that Raleigh tried to talk his captains into attacking the Mexican treasure fleet, the one from New Spain that would be sailing from Veracruz. But in the end most of the ships followed the Destiny to Newfoundland, where they took on board cargoes of fish and then returned to England. Can you imagine the looks on the faces of the investors?' Biddulph was shaking his white plumicorns. 'Newfoundland cod instead of Peruvian silver! Imagine the indignation of the dukes and princes of Germany and Holland when they learned how their religion was to be preserved by nothing more than a few crates of salted fish!'
So tragedy mixed with farce as the princes of Europe slid towards the precipice. As the months passed, more and more couriers arrived at Lambeth Palace and the Navy Office. Vienna had been besieged by the Transylvanians; Transylvania had been invaded by the Poles; the Poles had been attacked by the Turks-a deadly cycle of blows and counterblows, a return of evil for evil. Europe had become a fanged beast catching hold of its own tail. Negotiations were repudiated, treaties went unratified. In Prague, two Catholic delegates to a convention of the Bohemian Estates were hurled from a window of the castle but survived because they landed in a dunghill. Their survival was taken by dévots across Europe as a sign from God. Other armies began buckling on their swords. Three comets appeared in the sky and astrologers took them as irrefutable proof that the world was about to end.
'Which was not entirely wrong, was it?' Biddulph gloomily observed. 'Because there then followed thirty years of the worst wars the world has ever known.'
For a moment we walked beside the river in silence. I was still trying to understand it all, to discover a coherent pattern among these bizarre activities, these strange, half-hidden events with their mysterious players-ones that, so far as I could see, bore little relation to what Alethea had told me about Henry Monboddo and The Labyrinth of the World.
Biddulph had now begun describing how, soon, another piece of news was delivered to the Navy Office by a panting courier. This had been in the late autumn of the year 1618, a short time after the comets appeared and Raleigh went to the scaffold specially built for him in Westminster Palace Yard. The report claimed that a Spanish galleon, the Sacra Familia, part of the Mexican fleet, had gone down with all hands near the Spanish port of Santiago de Cuba. That she sank was a fact, though the circumstances surrounding the affair were more mysterious. It was whispered in the Navy Office that the Sacra Familia had been boarded and then sunk by soldiers from the Philip Sidney. For the Sidney had not returned to London. It appeared that, like a few of the other ships in the fleet, she was prowling the Spanish Indies, as the defeated Drake had done in '96. But details were almost impossible to find, even in the Navy Office. Fact and fable were flung hopelessly together.
Soon another report arrived that the Philip Sidney had sunk in the Spanish Indies, followed swiftly by yet another claiming that the Philip Sidney had captured the Sacra Familia, then a third that the Sacra Familia had merely sunk in a violent storm. But one rumour in particular enjoyed a long career-long enough for it to pass from rumour into the more august realms of myth. It thrived for many years in the taverns of Tower Hill and Rotherhithe, or wherever mariners gathered. Like other of the rumours, it claimed that the Philip Sidney had chased the galleon and then, after firing her broadside guns, watched her sink with all hands. Yet this had been a galleon like no other.
'I know the rumour,' Biddulph said, 'because I must have heard it a dozen times. It concerns certain passengers on board the Sacra Familia. Stowaways, you might say. Ones that survived her wreck by clinging to the shards of her hull or else swimming ashore.'
'Who were they?' I was listening intently now. 'Spanish sailors?'
He shook his head. 'No, not Spanish sailors. Not sailors of any sort.' He chuckled to himself for a second before spurting a stream of tobacco juice into the grass. We had almost reached Wapping, and ahead of us a number of watermen were sunning themselves on the New Crane Stairs. 'Rats. That's what the crewmen of the Sidney watched swim ashore while the Sacra Familia sank. Hundreds of rats. The waters churned with them, and some even made their way aboard the Sidney. Oh, I know,
what ship is not infested with rats? But these were not just any kind of rat, you must understand. None of the mariners had ever seen their like. They were twice the size of the rats on board the Philip Sidney. Great burly creatures, greyish-red in colour, with short legs and tails.' He paused for a second, chops twitching with an excited smile. 'In sum, Mr. Inchbold, these creatures were nothing other than bamboo rats.'
I had never heard of such things. 'I thought a rat was a rat.'
'Far from it. Jonston in his Natural History of Quadrupeds lists a good half-dozen types, including the rice rat and the cane rat. But this particular species, the bamboo rat, is unique in that it survives on a diet of bamboo shoots.'
'Bamboo? I wasn't aware that there was bamboo in Mexico.'
'Nor was I,' he replied. 'None has ever been sighted. Not anywhere in the Spanish Indies either.'
'So where did the rats come from if not Mexico or the Spanish Indies?'
He shrugged. 'Is it not obvious? They must have come aboard the Sacra Familia from somewhere that bamboo is found. And where is bamboo found but in the islands of the Pacific? In the Spice Islands, for instance. Jonston tells us that the bamboo rat is especially numerous in the Moluccas.'
'So the Sacra Familia had been to the Moluccas?'
'Or to an island elsewhere in the Pacific. Yes. What she was doing there is a conundrum, because Spanish voyages into the Pacific were rare in those years. Mendaña made his final voyage in search of the Solomon Islands in 1595, then Quirós and Tories followed in 1606. After that, though, there is almost nothing. The entire Pacific was fast becoming the domain of Spain's fiercest enemies, the Dutch, who had found a new passage into the South Seas through the Le Maire Strait. Many of the sea routes were now controlled by the ships of the Dutch East India Company.'
'So the Sacra Familia must have found another route,' I said eagerly, remembering the terms of Sir Ambrose's charter with its mission to discover a new passage to the South Seas. 'A route into the Pacific through the headwaters of the Orinoco.'
Biddulph shot me a surprised look. 'The idea has never occurred to me,' he replied, shaking his head. 'Nor was it mentioned in the rumours. Still, I must own that it's an interesting notion. But whatever she might have discovered, or however she might have reached it, the Sacra Familia had sailed in the Pacific, that much seems certain. Only now she was disguised as part of the Mexican treasure fleet. Her travels must have been a great secret, because when she was attacked by the Sidney her crew jettisoned all of her charts and portolanos, the ship's chronicle, the captain's log-everything that might have betrayed her mission. They got rid of everything, I should say, except her smell.'
That was the last and perhaps the most curious part of the story. For the Sacra Familia had possessed, even from the distance, a remarkable smell. It was not the usual smell of a ship at sea-the stink of rotting provisions, of bilgewater, of damp wood and gunpowder, of chamber-pots overturned by storms. On the contrary, it was a beautiful smell that seemed to float across the water towards the Philip Sidney, a delicious scent that reminded the mariners of incense or perfume. It seemed to hang over the water for hours after the burning wreck finally disappeared under the water. The bewitching scent was not, the rumours insisted, that of the cargo-some cargo that might have been loaded in the Moluccas-but of the ship herself, as if the aroma emanated in some mysterious way from her beams and masts.
'I never knew what to make of the stories, of either the rats or the beautiful smell. Only that, if the tales were true, the Sacra Familia was plainly not what she seemed.'
Yes, I thought, intrigued: her voyage was as mysterious as that of the Philip Sidney, to whom her fate was somehow bonded.
'So sorry, Mr. Inchbold,' he said with a gentle smile as he creaked open the door to his house. 'I fear I can tell you no more. Rumour and gossip, that is all I was ever to learn of the episode.'
We stepped back inside the little house, where I was treated to another cup of rumbullion. For the next hour I listened to other theories that Biddulph's leisure allowed him to concoct, including the 'dark matter' (as he called it) of Buckingham's murder in 1628, an act carried out not by a half-mad Puritan fanatic, as history recorded, but by an agent of Cardinal Richelieu cleverly disguised as a half-mad Puritan fanatic. But I was barely listening to Biddulph now. I was thinking instead of how it seemed that Sir Ambrose had once again sailed over the horizon and-for me at least-eluded configuration. I was also remembering the mysterious 1600 edition of Ortelius's Theatrum orbis terrarum, along with the patents in Alethea's muniment room, and thinking of how Sir Ambrose had been in Prague in the year 1620, two years and 6,000 miles from his mysterious adventures in the Spanish Indies. So I wondered if there was some deeper connection between these two doomed ventures, some invisible history that might involve the lost Hermetic text that Henry Monboddo and his mysterious client so desperately desired. Or was I merely becoming infected by Biddulph's curious line of logic in which no two events, however far apart in time or space, were ever unrelated?
And then I remembered what I had intended to ask him an hour or two earlier. I had actually stepped outside at the time and was in the midst of bidding him adieu. The sun had dropped behind the distant silhouette of Nonsuch House, and the waters of the river were grey as a gull's wing. I could feel the rumbullion going about its stealthy work inside me. I had missed my footing on the front step and there was a faint ringing in my ears that seemed to change pitch as we stepped outside. Our two shadows stretched all the way across the tiny garden.
'I was wondering,' I asked after we had clasped hands, 'did you ever meet Captain Plessington? Did he visit the Navy Office?'
'No.' Biddulph shook his head. 'I never met Plessington. Not once. He was far too important to deal with someone like me, you understand. I was only a humble assistant to the Clerk of the Acts in those days. No, I saw him only once, and that was on the night when the Sidney cast off her lines and sailed down the Thames. Plessington was standing on the quarterdeck, and I could see him faintly in the light of the stern-lamp.'
'But all of the preparations for her sailing…?'
'Oh, Plessington had a delegate for details like that. Everything was arranged either through him or the Sidney's purser.'
'A delegate?'
'Yes.' He was squinting at his eaves now, frowning deeply. The wind sighed at our backs and riffled the waves. 'Now… what the devil was his name? It's just that I spend so much time in the reign of Queen Bess that sometimes my old brain gets befuddled by names. No… wait!' Suddenly his little face brightened. 'No, no, I remember his name after all. A strange name it was, too. Monboddo,' he pronounced triumphantly. 'Yes, that was it. Henry Monboddo.'
Chapter Twelve
There is no sight so sublime, the philosopher Lucretius tells us, as a shipwreck at sea. And the wreck of the Bellerophon did indeed make a spectacular sight for the onlookers who left their crofts and cottages to gather on the windy shores of the Chislet Marshes. She broke apart on the Margate Hook at some time after five o'clock in the afternoon. She had already been bilged in the midships, and with her starboard bow forced by the waves against the reef-the largest and most dangerous reef along the entire coast of Kent-it was only a matter of seconds before she shipped a dozen tons of water through her hull and then heeled clumsily on to her beam-ends. Her masts had toppled like ruined steeples and her yards and shrouds were hurled away. The waves foamed white about her hull before bursting in cascades over her fo'c'sle deck. Everyone on the upper decks was swept into the roiling sea, while those still below decks fared no better. The men frantically working the hand-pumps were either drowned as fountains of water thundered into the hold or else crushed to death as casks and puncheons tumbled like rogue oxen across the tilting deck. Others broke their necks or skulls against the stanchions, which themselves were splintering to bits, and still others had the misfortune to be trapped by falling beams and then drowned as the tide of water burst through the hatchways. And so it was that
by the time the Bellerophon was smashed to a thousand pieces on the Margate Hook, there was not a single soul left alive inside her.
Her wreckage was swiftly scavenged. Almost a hundred onlookers had gathered along the muddy stretch of beach, and three enormous stacks of driftwood were lit. The bonfires' garish light lent an almost festive atmosphere to the scene. The Margate Hook and the havoc it wreaked with the occasional passing ship made one of the few consolations of living on this desolate edge of Kent. Folk were hoping for a repeat of the famous episode three years earlier when the Scythia was cracked open like an oyster on the very same spot, making humble fishermen and winkle-pickers drunk as lords on two hundred butts of Spanish malmsey. So as soon as the sea grew calm enough, a flotilla of a dozen-odd cutters and smacks was launched into the waves. By first light more than a score of crates had been dragged ashore, as had thirteen sopping and dishevelled crewmen.
Among them was Captain Quilter. For more than ten hours he had clung to one of the ninety-nine contraband boxes as it bobbed and wallowed in the heavy swell, sucked back and forth by outgoing and then incoming tides. But as full tide had come a second time the bonfires suddenly loomed before him and the crate washed up with a bump in the shallows. He was exhausted and frozen from his ordeal, but no sooner had his feet touched shingle than three men wading rapidly forward-his saviours, so he thought-shoved him back into the combers. The crate was scraped ashore and stacked with a score of others.
'You people have no right of salvage here.' He had righted himself and was splashing through the mud and sand towards a group of figures gathered round one of the bonfires. More boxes and chests were being dragged from the waters, while a small convoy of donkey-carts laden with others began winding its way into the marshes. 'These crates are flotsam, the legal property of the Bellerophon, and I as her captain-'
