A King's Trade

by Dewey Lambdin

  “Four foot even, I make it,” Bosun Pendarves announced, at last. “Four foot even allow th’ hances, fore-and-aft. Oak main piece, fir sacrifice boards, an’ all, Garroway. Did her builders follow ol’ Navy fashion, that’d mean she’d widen t’five foot, seven inch at th’ sole.”

  “What d’ye make it, Buckley?” Garroway asked one of his junior mates, who had shinnied up the green-slimed main piece to the gallery above, where the upper stock entered the overhanging counter.

  “Two foot, two inches wide, Mister Garroway,” the Carpenter’s Mate called down. “Two foot, four inch, fore-and-aft. An’ th’ tiller mortices look sound, too. Nothin’ sprung, f’um wot I kin see.”

  “Means the main piece would taper to four inches wide, at the sole, then,” Garroway said with a satisfied grunt and nod. “We need a stock t’be one foot, six inches, the sole t’be three inches wide. We can plane that down, easy enough, hey?”

  “Aye,” Pendarves agreed, lost in their own little arcane world. “We carry a stock o’ one foot, eight inch, front t’back, an’ planes an’ adzes’ll take care o’ that. Whether she’s wormed, though …” he said, finding a new fret to frown over, and digging into a canvas bucket full of odds and ends, then produced a small drill-auger with which to take a few sample bores from the exposed portion of the rudder’s main piece.

  “Taller than we need,” the Carpenter pointed out. “Shorten the stock, that’s easy….”

  “Cut new mortices for th’ tiller bars, aye,” Pendarves agreed, “a’low th’ old’uns. Make me calmer in mind, d’we do that. Stronger,” the Bosun muttered, happily drilling away. “Ship this size fits seven sets o’ pintles an’ gudgeons… Proteus fits five…so we’ll haveta bore fresh bolt-holes, too, an’ that makes me even gladder.”

  “Strip the fir trailing-edge timber off, plane the main piece to a taper,” Garroway speculated, “and might lop a bit off the sole as well, so she’s even with our sternpost.”

  “Uhum,” Pendarves dreamily replied.

  “Salvage the copper disks ‘tween pintles and gudgeon holes….”

  “Goes without sayin’…

  ““Our old sternpost, though…”

  “Aye, there’s yer bugger.”

  “Take a morticed block from this’un, and shiv it into ours, or… rip this bigger post clean off, trim it down, and replace ours, do ye think?” Garroway asked.

  “Be a bitch, that, but… might be stronger, all in all! Aha!” Pendarves cried, sounding very pleased. He withdrew his drill-auger and carefully cupped a palm-ful of oak shavings…as bright, fresh, and worm-free as the best “seasoned in-frame” timber from an English dockyard. “Cap’m sir… I do allow we got ourselves a sound rudder!”

  “Marvellous!” Lewrie crowed, all but ready to swing his hat in the air and cry, “Huzzah!” Though, after a long look up the rudder…

  “How heavy d’ye think it is, though, Mister Pendarves?” he asked in a soberer voice. “And, how the Devil do we get the damned thing off in one piece?”

  “Well, hmmm …” from both Pendarves and Garroway.

  I knew it couldn’t be this easy!Lewrie told himself.

  Indeed, it wasn’t. First off, Mr. Goosen’s Javanese divers had to swim down to survey that part of the rudder that lay underwater, and in what condition the unseen pintles and gudgeons were. The locals had already taken the long, straight tillers, so temporary new ones had to be cut so they could turn the rudder while it hung at its precarious angle. Uncontrolled, when they attempted to hoist it free of the gudgeons, its great weight could crush or kill someone.

  Hoisting chains had to be rigged from above, thick cables run from the chains to the after capstan, and new bars fashioned to insert into it, for the local Boers had taken those, as well.

  The sacrificial trailing-edge pieces of fir had to be stripped off to lighten it, the hard and water-resistant elm dowel pins saved for later use, and that took many dives by the Javanese, too, so they could hammer them out while several feet down and holding their breath.

  The triangular strips of “bearding” elm from the centreline of the sternpost, and the forward edge of the rudder, also had to be removed with care, so they could employ them on Proteus, too.

  Involving even more diving (and Lewrie’s money), a hole had to be drilled through both the leading edge and trailing edge of the rudder’s sole, and ropes threaded through them, led up either side of the stern to the jeer bitts, and belayed. When that massive weight was hoisted free, there had to be some way of controlling its swinging, and half of Lewrie’s working-party would be tailing onto those lines while another half would be breasting to the new capstan bars. And, as Mr. Goosen explained, trying to drill underwater was a long, laborious process, where one turn on a drill-auger could rotate the worker off his feet, unless anchored with a weight on the bottom, and loops of line where he could snag his toes.

  Naturally, all that took days longer than Goosen had estimated, with a resultant increase in the final cost, as did the cost of keeping Mr. de Witt’s waggons, beasts, and kaffir workers idly waiting for the rudder to be recovered, and trekked back to Cape Town.

  As frustrating as the delay was, Lewrie found that camping out on the bluffs could be enjoyable…so long as precautions were made against snakes, spiders, scorpions, and other nasty native buggers. Simon’s Bay and False Bay were wide and yawningly empty and the surf was calm on all but the worst days. A firm, stiff wind swirled in, cooling even the hottest part of the day, and, all-in-all, Lewrie found the climate near the 40th Latitude so mild and in-vigourating, the sound of the surf raling on the beach so pacific, and the dawns so cool and bracing, that Lewrie began to think of the Cape as a prickly sort of Paradise.

  Late each afternoon, after the Javanese divers were exhausted, and the sunlight on the waters slanted at too great an angle for them to see what they were doing, all work ceased but for camp chores, and experiments by sailors off Proteus at fishing, halving off in watch-versus-watch to stage a football match on the hard-packed lower beach, or lounging about like the aforesaid “Lotus Eaters” after a refreshing dip in the surf, themselves… careful to keep an eye out for sharks, which were reputed to teem in southern African waters, and were of an especially vicious, man-eating nature…or snoozing in the shade of a tent fly ‘til mess chores summoned them.

  Lewrie had his horse, and had fetched along his lighter fusil musket. For a “piddling fee,” Andries de Witt offered him the loan of a young Boer by name of Piet du Toit as a hunting guide, and Lewrie got into the habit of riding out into the countryside each afternoon with the lanky thatch-haired Boer, in search of game.

  Settled as the lower Cape below the Cederburgs and Drakensburgs were, as neatly Dutch-orderly as the farmland appeared, game was still plentiful, and with the larger predators driven out by years of “pest” or trophy hunting, decent-sized herds of ungulants had prospered with the lions’ absence, and every day ended with something for the pot.

  Piet du Toit wasn’t the most talkative fellow, but he did enjoy pointing out a few cautions on their rides: how to spot puff adders or black mambas; how to scan trees very warily for the slim, green, tree-dwelling boomslang that was so poisonous; both versions of cobras to avoid, the Cape cobra that bit and chewed its venom into a wound, and the rinkhals that could spit death into one’s eyes a goodly distance.

  They ran across a bewildering array of beasts, such as rhebok, reedbok, red hartebeest, steenbok, and klipspringer, wee duikers, and grysbok, larger elands, and impalas, and God only knew what-all. Piet du Toit boasted that this was nothing, for north beyond the Cederburg Range, out in the Great Karoo savannahs and vlies, there were bigger creatures: kudu and wildebeest, Cape buffalo, giraffes, hippos, and rhinoceros, warthogs, zebras, and elephants, and, the kings of all, the lions! Du Toit would go there, he swore, once he found a properly sweet wife, and amassed enough money for waggons, oxen, horses, guns, and kaffir slaves. He’d find a well-watered spot, break ground with the plough, and sta
rt raising his herds and flocks, and if that land played out, or he got bored, there’d always be something even grander to see, a week’s trek farther along. Town life was so boresome, and confining! No place to raise a brood of a dozen children.

  The bird life was equally fascinating to Lewrie, both the ones worth shooting and those too grand to eat, for the countryside teemed with them, too. Ostriches and tall, dignified secretary birds, Kori bustards that looked too big to fly, but did, cattle egrets, and red oxpeckers, hornbills, storks, ibises, a dozen varieties of eagles, hawks and owls, kites, buzzards, falcons, kestrels, and goshawks.

  On the gentler side, there were hoopoes and louries, the lilac-breasted rollers, bee eaters, glossy and plum-coloured starlings, the waxbills that came in either yellow, blue, or violet, red bishops and jewel-like sunbirds, and the maricos that came in their own palette of vivid colours.

  For shooting, there were red-eyed doves, laughing doves, ring-necked Cape turtledoves, and Namaqua doves; helmeted guinea fowl, crested francolins, and sandgrouse, moorhens, Egyptian geese, yellow-bill or white-faced ducks, Cape teals, even flamingos (which only the richest ancient Romans had eaten) that ended on Lewrie’s plate, though young du Toit was the better shot with a double-barreled fowling gun, nailing three for each one that Lewrie brought down.

  There were anteaters and honey badgers, or ratels as the Boers called them, mongooses, and four kinds of smaller hunting cats: civets and genets, which were closer to mongooses than true cats; servals, and caracals…and jackals and Cape foxes, and bat-eared foxes, and if Lewrie ever wished to take a real hunting trip, he could bring back pelts and masks from leopards, cheetahs, and lions…for a reasonable fee, of course. Piet du Toit swore he could outfit him with anything he wished…tentage, bearers and cooks, body-servants, waggons, spirits, and gunpowder. Even a string quartet, if he wished!

  “Some people I know have hired a guide, and gone on an inland hunt,” Lewrie remarked one afternoon as they watered their horses by a small stream. “Those circus folk, who staged those shows.”

  “Those stupid rooineks?” du Toit harshly laughed, between bites off a strip of biltong, a sun-dried meat of unknown source. “The gut God help them, myhneer, for they go vit’ Jan van der Merwe.”

  “B’lieve that was the name they mentioned, aye,” Lewrie slowly allowed, his curiosity up and stirring. “Why? What’s wrong with this… van der Merwe?”

  “Machtig, myhneer… what is right?” du Toit scoffed back with sour mirth.

  “A sham, is he? A ‘Captain Sharp’?” Lewrie asked further.

  “Don’t know this Kaptein Sharp kerel you speak of, myhneer, A sham? Oh, ja. Jan van der Merwe is, what you call, a joke? He could get lost in a field of mealies… cannot trail smoke back to a campfire! Once, he think he tame hyenas, thinking they are just another kind of big puppy-dog, haw haw! Those circus people mean to hunt out in the vlies, they have no need of guide to find game. Just ride far enough, they will see thousands of beasts an hour! Only need kaffirs to butcher and skin, drove oxen to bring back pelt and ivory, set up the camps, and cook, you see? Any fool can boss camp kaffirs… know just enough Bantu to tell them what to do. Ha! Van der Merwe cannot speak proper Dutch, much less…”

  “They were, ah…more of a mind to capture animals than hunt for trophies,” Lewrie explained. “To add to their menagerie and such? Real zebras, ‘stead o’ tarted-up donkeys, elephants to ride and train to do tricks, lion cubs to raise…”

  “African elephant?” du Toit gasped in true shock, raising his voice higher than his usual cautious field-mutter. “African elephant is not like the Indian, myhneer! Try to train them, they stomp you in ground, then mash you to soup! Sad-tempered beasts, good only for the shooting, and ivory. And, anyone think to steal cubs from a pride of lions, they end up eaten to the bone, and their bones cracked! Bones end as play-things for those cubs!”

  ” Thought it sounded a touch daft,” Lewrie replied.

  “Machtig God,” du Toit exclaimed, “those people tell that fool van der Merwe that is what they plan? They pay him good money for him as guide? You never see them again, Kaptein Lewrie. Rooinek idiots…even so, I feel sorry for them.”

  “What is a rooinek, Mister du Toit?” Lewrie felt pressed to ask, though the picture of Arslan Durschenko being gnawed down to splinters was intriguing.

  “Ah…rooineck in Cape Dutch means ‘red neck,’ Kaptein,” his guide matter-of-factly decyphered, well, perhaps with a tiny touch of arch amusement in his eyes. “Your British soldiers come here, we see their tight red collars…the colour they turn in the sun, too, you see? What we say, instead of British. More biltong?”

  “No thankee, I’ve eat sufficient,” Lewrie replied, thinking it odd that he wasn’t offended. “Uhm, what is biltong made of, then? It puts me in mind of venison or beef ‘jerky,’ as the American Indians I met called it, but…”

  “Ja, it is any kind of game meat,” du Toit told him, though he seemed suddenly distracted, moved very slowly and carefully, and felt behind him for his musket, his eyes fixed on something beyond. “Cape buffalo, old cow, anything.”

  “Smoked?” Lewrie asked.

  “Dried in the sun, maybe with nets to keep the bugs off. Get your musket ready, myhneer…slowly,” du Toit instructed in a harsh whisper. “Take the reins of your horse, too…gently, and do not spook him before the crocodiles do, if you wish to ride back to camp.”

  “Croc…?” Lewrie gawped, fighting the urge to whirl about and shout something nigh to “Holy Shit!”

  His horse had drunk its fill, and had grazed over to some green grass, so it never even noticed the crocodile, as big as a Louisianan’s cypress-log pirogue, that had stealthily slunk off the far bank of the stream about a musket-shot above them, and had let itself be wafted by the faint current to close pistol-shot, only its horny-scaled head and eyes visible.

  “Rub ‘em with spices?” Lewrie asked, once they were saddled up and paced out of snapping distance.

  “Crocodile?” du Toit gawped, turning to look quizzically at him.

  ” Biltong,” Lewrie said.

  “Some do.”

  “Cheap, is it?”

  “Very cheap, myhneer”, du Toit replied.

  “Might make a nice change from salt-meat junk aboard my ship,” Lewrie speculated. “And, I’ve my two cats to feed. Does it keep long?”

  “Months, Kaptein.”

  “Better and better!” Lewrie enthused. “But it by the bale, I’d expect. By the hundredweight. Soak it in water….”

  “You can add it to bredies, soups, stews …” du Toit suggested. “But, myhneer… why buy, when you can shoot your own, and I can dry it for you…for a very cheap price, that is,” he added, with an avariciously sly grin. “We start now, Kaptein. Small herd of steenbok…there,” he whispered, pointing at something only he could see, at about half a mile or so, for Lewrie couldn’t spot them at all. “Get up close, leave the horses, and…creep up there,” du Toit decided, after licking a finger to determine the direction of the wind. “Take one each, we will have a nice small roast, tonight, and cousin Andries’s kaffirs can prepare you the rest as biltong in two days. Hundredweight, as you say, between the pair. And steenbok doe is tender. Ja?”

  I knew he was another damn’ “cousin”! Lewrie told himself.

  “Might need a third for the hands’ supper,” Lewrie speculated.

  “I have second musket,” du Toit smugly told him, patting a scabbard under his saddle. “Three steenbok it could be. We try?”

  “Aye, let’s!” Lewrie agreed with a feral grin.

  The brace of steenbok didn’t cause the sensation in camp, that evening— surprisingly, du Toit had missed with his second shot, once the steenbok had been startled into great springing bounds and leaps, and darting evasions at the crack of musket fire—rather it was the crocodile tail-meat that they’d fetched in, once they’d decided to go back and bag it, after all.

  Lewrie and his guide had both shot it in the head
at the same time, within two inches of each other, so the skull was ruined for a trophy, but the largest teeth were still impressive, as was the still-moist hide. The black waggoners, bearers, and cooks had sprung on it, to stake it out for drying in the sun, along with the steenboks they had field-dressed, and one of them swore he could string those teeth into a quite nice necklace, if baas Lewrie wished…heathen, savage but nice.

  Along with the slices of roast steenbok, there were treats that the burghers and women of Simon’s Town had come to sell, now that they were over their “sulks” at rooineks camping out too near their proper and tidy Boer settlement, and helping themselves to part of the wreck that was theirs by right.

  They vended more bredies and mutton boboties, more Sumatran or Javanese satays, along with piping-hot fresh breads and syrupy sweet baked koeksisters or pies. Along with the viands, though, so Lewrie learned, there had come strong and hearty Dutch beer, some local rum, some of the rawer sort of Cape wines, and that gin-clear Dutch peril, that “tangle-tongue” akavit.

  “Sound a tad too me-hearty, Mister Pendarves?” Lewrie scoffed, once he got the Bosun off to one side for a heart-to-heart. The last thing he needed, with the ship’s hands off ashore and given much ease from their unremitting daily schedule, was too much drink. Riot and mutiny were the worst he could expect; the least would be people kept on such strict spirit rations drinking themselves into insensibility, and uselessness on the morrow, given the slightest opportunity.

  “That Mister Goosen, and Mister de Witt, told the locals that they’d best not get ‘em too hot, sir,” Pendarves cautiously laid out in his own defence. “Small bottles an’ such, an’ Mister Gamble an’ I been keepin’ a wary eye on th’ trade, too, sir.”