The Confusion

by Neal Stephenson

  "Of all the enterprises to which a man can devote his energies," van Hoek began grudgingly, raising his voice, "long-distance trade is the most profitable. It is what every Jew, Puritan, Dutchman, Huguenot, Armenian, and Banyan aspires to—it is what built the Navies and palaces of Europe, the Court of the Great Mogul in Shahjahanabad, and many other prodigies besides. And yet in the world of trade, it is common knowledge that no circuit—not the slave trade of the Caribbean, not the spice trade of the Indies—exceeds the Manila-to-Acapulco run in sheer profit. The wealthiest Banyans in Surat and bankers in Genoa lay their perfumed heads on silken pillows at night, and dream of sending a few bales of cargo across the Pacific on the Manila Galleon. Even with all the dangers, and the swingeing duty that must be shelled out to the Viceroy, the profits never fall below four hundred percent. That city is founded upon such dreams, Jack. We are all going to go there now."

  Van Hoek finally shut up at this point, and in the silence that followed he realized that, down below him on the upperdeck, his rant was being dutifully translated into diverse heathen tongues. The translators took more or less time to relate it, depending on the wordiness of their several languages and how much they edited out or how freely they embellished. But when the last of them finally wound up his oration, a light pattering started up. Jack flinched, thinking it was more hail. But then it grew into a heavy, stomping roar, and he recognized it as applause. Dappa thrust both index fingers into his mouth and emitted a piercing noise. Van Hoek seemed startled at first; then understanding dawned, and he turned to Jack, removed his hat, and bowed.

  JANUARY 1700

  At bottom, all our experience assures us of only two things, namely, that there is a connection among our appearances, which provides us the means to predict future appearances with success, and that this connection must have a constant cause.

  —LEIBNIZ

  G. W. Leibniz, President

  Berlin Academy

  Berlin, Prussia

  To Mr. Daniel Waterhouse, Chancellor

  Massachusetts Bay Institute of Technologickal Arts

  Newtowne, Massachusetts Bay Colony

  Dear Daniel,

  The appearance of your letter on the doorstop of my Academy brought unlooked-for cheer to an otherwise frosty Berlin day, which developed into pleasure when I read that your Institute now has a roof over its head, and joy when you expressed your continued desire to collaborate with me. I confess that when two years passed without word from you, I thought you had been killed by Indians or hanged for a witch!

  Much has happened since we last exchanged letters. You have probably noticed that I have a new address (Berlin) and what is more, it is in a new kingdom (Prussia). The monarch you knew by the name Elector Frederick III of Brandenburg is now called King Frederick I of Prussia. He is the same chap, still joyfully married to the same Sophie Charlotte, living in and ruling from the same palace that he built for her in Berlin, but he has (through machinations that would only disfigure this letter) persuaded the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna (still Leopold I, in case you have not been keeping up) to suffer him to use the title of King. His family (the Hohenzollerns) have been the Dukes of Prussia as well as Electors of Brandenburg for so many generations that it made sense to merge the two countries. The result is called Prussia but still ruled out of Brandenburg.

  Sophie is as vigorous and crafty as always. She and her daughter have deemed it unwise to give the appearance of being too close, as this would give the idea, to friends and foes alike, that Sophie was now controlling an immense German state stretching from Königsberg in the east almost all the way west to the Rhine. For various reasons she prefers to seem instead like a contented elderly widow; so she lets her son George Louis think that he rules Hanover, and she travels to Berlin only occasionally, to pinch the cheeks of her grandchildren and put on a great show of harmlessness.

  I shuttle back and forth between Hanover and Berlin all the time, to the point where the more bloody-minded Berlin courtiers were beginning to whisper that I must be acting as a secret conduit for Sophie's influence. The problem being that I could not point to any official reason why I should be in Berlin so frequently. The real reasons (to have interesting conversations with Sophie Charlotte and her brilliant circle of friends, and to tutor Princess Caroline) are scoffed at by that sort of person.

  Hence the Berlin Academy, of which I am the first president. It seems like the sort of institution that a King ought to found (the fashion having been established, of course, by your Charles II with his Royal Society) and so doing it makes Frederick's new title seem that much more richly deserved. And being its president gives me an excuse to be in Berlin whenever I wish.

  And it is well that I have something to belong to other than the Royal Society! By now you have probably received copies of the dreadful publications of last year: volume three of Wallis's work, in which my twenty-five-year-old correspondence with Newton is exposed to the whole world, and made to seem like something other than what it really was, and Fatio's Lineae Brevissimi Descensus, which is yet another bitter assault on me. A school of thought seems to be developing, according to which I had no inkling of the calculus until I stole the whole thing from Newton around 1677. Apparently my years of toil in Paris under the tutelage of Huygens count for nothing!

  I had best not begin to rant and rave about this. Let me instead turn to some of your questions.

  Yes, I still correspond with Eliza. How could I not? But, as many people do when they have children, she settled, at some point, into a more steady kind of life, and since has not written to me as frequently. When the peace treaty was signed between France and the allies three years ago, her title as Duchess of Qwghlm was recognized by the French court, and she began to travel frequently to England—though almost never with her husband. She keeps a town-house near St. James's and has even journeyed to Qwghlm occasionally to renew her ties to the place of her birth. Once or twice a year she journeys to my part of the world to spend time with her bastard son and to pay a call on Sophie. Her husband, with his long-standing connexions to the Navy, is more fond of Qwghlm than she is, and seems to phant'sy that the massive Castle there has the makings of a country house—though it is difficult to think of a more outlandish and wretched setting for one! And so he is there several months this last year overseeing a project to rebuild one part of that ruin, and make it over into a villa and a proper seat for the nascent Duchy of Arcachon-Qwghlm. Some in London grumble that he is getting ready to turn Qwghlm into a French naval base, à la Dunkerque. But I cannot imagine Eliza allowing any such thing to happen.

  As a way of making a name for herself in London society she supports a charity for Vagabond-soldiers, which has been a pet cause of hers for some years. After the peace treaty was signed and the Tories came into power, the size of England's army was drastically reduced, many regiments disbanded, and out-of-work soldiers have been roaming around the country making trouble ever since. Eliza's obvious concern for them is an implicit criticism of Tory policies, which should put her in a good position if the Juncto ever returns to power.

  Concerning her opposition to Slavery, she is not as outspoken, even though her feelings run deeper. She knows that to make a pest of herself on this topic would cause her to be ejected from society altogether, and to lose any hope of effecting change. Those in the legal profession are well aware of the work she has done in the last few years to secure freedom for some of the Taunton maids who were enslaved by Jeffreys after Monmouth's Rebellion.

  It is well that she maintains good relations with the Whigs. As you must know if you get any letters from London at all, they are close to Princess Anne, who will probably reign over England sooner or later. And they are the party of active foreign policy—or, setting aside euphemisms, of war. That wretch, King Carlos II (the Sufferer) of Spain, who has been on his death-bed for something like thirty-five years now, cannot possibly live much longer—no, really!—and when he dies there will certainly be another great war.
For make no mistake. Louis XIV covets Spain, with her Empire and her mines and her mints. It must be admitted that the duc d'Anjou has as good a claim to the throne as anyone else. Never mind that he happens to be the loyal and obedient grandson of Louis XIV!

  If you do not get a lot of mail, you might be saying, wait! I thought the matter had been settled by treaty, and that the Electoral Prince of Bavaria was going to be King of Spain. But he has died, suddenly and strangely. The Empire has nominated its own candidate: Archduke Charles, the younger son of the Holy Roman Emperor. There is public talk of negotiations and partition-treaties, but private preparation for war. And as the stakes of that war will be Spain, the beating heart that circulates silver and gold through the world's markets, we may expect that it will be harder-fought even than the last one.

  But on to more interesting matters.

  You say you would collaborate with me. I will try to dissuade you by mentioning two facts. First, it is now clear that you will be ostracized from the Royal Society if you associate your name with mine. Second, we will be working for a chap who has his minions broken on the wheel if they incur his displeasure. No, I am not talking about my new King of Prussia, but about a taller monarch who lives farther to the east and owns about half of the planet.

  If I have not scared you away yet, then consider the nature of the work. The thing I want to make embodies very little that is beautiful or elegant mathematically. It will consist of two components: a mechanical system for performing arithmetickal and logical operations upon numbers, and a vast compendium of data that will inform the operations of that machine. Much work remains to be carried out on both of these fronts. The former promises more satisfaction, in that it is a practical pursuit, akin to Hooke's watch-making, and one may see the machine take shape on the workbench, and point to this gear or that shaft with a measure of pride. But I fear it is not what really demands our attention now. Think of how the art of watch-making has advanced during our lifetimes alone, beginning with Huygens's pendulums, &c., and extrapolate this into the future, and you will readily agree that arithmetickal engines will only get better with time. On the other hand—with due respect for the work that you and Wilkins did on the Philosophical Language—we have only just embarked upon the amassing of the data and the writing-out of the logical rules that will govern the machine's workings.

  You are the protégé of Wilkins and the only man still living who worked on that project; on his deathbed he passed his mantle on to you. It follows that you are the man best suited to assemble and organize the data that our machine shall require, and to place it in a form that may be read and understood by a machine. This is a matter of assigning prime numbers to the symbols and then encoding them in some medium, probably as binary digits. The medium needs to be something enduring, for it may be many generations before machines can be constructed that are capable of doing the work. Best would be thin sheets of gold.

  For my part, I confess I have a thousand distractions, which conspire to make me a poor collaborator indeed. Any work that demands a vast amount of un-interrupted time is impossible for me—which is why I have suggested that you, alone in your quiet Massachusetts cabin, are better qualified to draw up the immense symbol-tables.

  Setting aside political entanglements, calculus-controversies, and the three Ladies (Sophie, Sophie Charlotte, and Princess Caroline) who never stop asking me to explain things to them, my chief project, at the moment, is the monadology.

  At any rate, what it comes down to is that my life for the next several years will consist of flying back and forth between Hanover and Berlin (with perhaps the occasional excursion to St. Petersburg!) trying to work out a beautiful set of logical rules. That matches well with the other part of the arithmetickal engine project, namely, writing down the set of rules that will govern how it processes symbols. As a matter of fact I should like to think that these two sets of rules—the one governing monads, the other governing the mechanical mind—will turn out to be one and the same. So I propose to take on this part of the undertaking myself, as it is so similar to what I am doing anyway.

  That is my proposal for how we might collaborate, Daniel, and I hope it pleases you. The Tsar is fearsome it's true, but he is far away from you, and extremely distracted putting down the Raskolniki and the Streltsy and making war on the Swedes. I do not think you need to fear him. Hard as it might be to believe, there is no monarch in the world more committed to advancing what you call the Technologickal Arts. I believe that if I were to ask him for a ton of gold, explaining that we wanted to use it to store data, he would hand it over in a moment. But first you and I need to come up with some data so that those plates will not remain as blank as Mr. Locke's tabula rasa.

  Yours affectionately,

  Leibniz

  LATE 1700 AND EARLY 1701

  Such are the Diseases and Terrors of the long Calms, where the Sea stagnates and corrupts for Want of Motion; and by the Strength of the Scorching Sun stinks and poisons the distrest Mariners, who are rendered unactive, and disabled by Scurvies, raging and mad with Calentures and Fevers, and drop into Death in such a Manner, that at last the Living are lost, for Want of the Dead, that is, for want of Hands to work the Ship.

  —DANIEL DEFOE, A Plan of the English Commerce

  M INERVA DROPPED ANCHOR below the burning mountain of Griga in the Marian Islands on the fifth of September. The next day the Shaftoe boys and a squad of Filipino sailors went ashore and ascended to the rim of a secondary cinder-cone on the western slope of the mountain proper. They established a watch-post there, within sight of Minerva. For two days they flew a single flag, which meant We are here, and still alive. The next day it was two flags, which meant We have seen sails coming out of the west, and the day after that it was three, meaning It is the Manila Galleon.

  Van Hoek had the crew make preparations for departure. The next morning the Shaftoe boys struck their camp and came down, still coughing and rubbing their eyes from the fumes that hissed out of that cinder-cone day and night, and after splashing around gleefully in the cove for a few minutes, washing off dust and sweat, they came out to Minerva in the longboat and announced that the Galleon had commenced her long northward run at dawn.

  For two days they wove a course among the Marian Islands—a chain that ran from about thirteen degrees at its southern end, to about twenty degrees at the north. Some of the islands were steep-sided volcanoes with deep water all around, but most were so flat that they did not rise more than a yard or two above the level of the ocean, be they never so large. These were belted all round with dangerous shallows, and yet they were easy to overlook in darkness or weather. So for a few days their energies were devoted to simply not disembowelling themselves on coral-reefs, and they did not see the Manila Galleon at all.

  Some of the islands were populated by stocky natives who came and went in outrigger canoes, and one or two even had Jesuit missions on them, built of mud, like wasps' nests. The sheer desolation of the place explained why they'd chosen it as a rendezvous point. If Minerva had set out from Cavite on the same tide as the Galleon, it would have been obvious to everyone in the Philippines that some conspiracy had been forged. Almost as bad, it would have added several weeks to the length of Minerva's voyage. The Manila Galleon was such a wallowing pig of a ship, and had been so gravely overloaded by Manila's officialdom, that only a storm could move it. The exit from Manila Bay, which took most ships but a single day, had taken the Manila Galleon a week. Then, rather than taking to the open sea, she had turned south and then east, and picked her way down the tortuous passages between Luzon and the islands to the south, anchoring frequently, and occasionally pausing to say a mass over the wrack of some predecessor; for the passage was marked out, not with buoys, but with the remains of Manila Galleons from one, ten, fifty, or a hundred years past. Finally the Galleon had reached a sheltered anchorage off a small island called Ticao. She had dropped anchor there and spent three weeks gazing out over twenty miles of water at the gap b
etween the southern extremity of Luzon, and the northern cape of Samar, which was called the San Bernardino Strait. Beyond it the Pacific stretched all the way to Acapulco. Yet Luzon might as well have been Scylla and Samar Charybdis, because (as the Spaniards had learnt the hard way) any ship that tried to sally through that gap when the tides and the winds were not just so would be cast away. Twice she had raised anchor and set sail for the Strait only to turn back when the wind shifted slightly.

  Boats had come out to the Galleon at all hours to replenish her stocks of drinking water, fruit, bread, and livestock, which were being drawn down at an appalling rate by the merchants and men of the cloth who were packed into her cabins. Indeed this had been the whole point of taking the route through the San Bernardino Strait, for by going that way they had been able to get two hundred and fifty miles closer to the Marianas without passing out of sight of the Philippines.

  When finally she had broken out on the tenth of August—a month and a half after departing Manila—she had done so fully provisioned. Almost as important, the officials, priests, and soldiers who had stood by at the foot of Bulusan Volcano to witness and salute the great ship's departure had seen her venture forth into the Pacific alone.

  Minerva had sailed out of Manila Bay two weeks after the Galleon and had gone for a leisurely cruise round the northern tip of Luzon, then had looped back to the south and taken shelter in Lagonoy Gulf, which emptied into the Pacific some sixty miles to the north of the San Bernardino Strait. There, by trading with natives and making occasional hunting and gathering forays, they had been able to keep their own stocks replenished while they had waited for the Galleon to escape from the Philippine Islands. Padraig Tallow had been among the crowd at the foot of Bulusan watching that event, and he'd thrown his peg-leg over the saddle of a horse and ridden northward until he had come to a high place above the Gulf of Lagonoy whence he could signal Minerva by building a smokey fire. Minerva had fired the Irishman a twenty-gun salute and hoisted her sails. Padraig Tallow's doings after that were unknown to them. If he'd stayed in character, he'd have stood where he was until the tip of Minerva's mainmast had sunk below the eastern horizon, weeping and singing incomprehensible chanties. If things had gone according to plan, he'd then ridden his horse through the bundok, following the tracks from one steamy mission-town to the next, until he'd reached Manila, and he and Surendranath, and the one son of Queen Kottakkal who'd survived the last years' voyaging, and several other Malabaris were now making their way down the long coast of Palawan to join Mr. Foot in Queena-Kootah.