The Confusion

by Neal Stephenson

  Of course in this case it wasn't, and so the letters would say something else. As the only two survivors of the disaster, Elizabeth and Edmund would perforce be the authors of those letters. Van Hoek would make a report, too, as a courtesy to the Viceroy. Much hinged upon how exactly those letters were worded, and on how Minerva's involvement was explained. The two survivors had spent much of the journey from the Golden Gate to Cabo San Lucas writing and re-writing them, and had continued to make revisions until a few minutes before the documents had been placed on the longboat and despatched toward the shore. Minerva had cruised past the port of Chiamela, which was large and well-sheltered by islands but too shallow for large ships, and continued a few hours down the coast to the deep-water port of Navidad. By then it must have been obvious to the Alcalde of Chiamela, who was pursuing them on horseback the whole way, that this was no Manila Galleon, and that something had gone wrong. But not until Minerva's longboat pulled to within shouting distance of Navidad did anyone who'd not been on the voyage learn of what had happened in the middle of the Pacific. There was a suitable eruption of wailing, cursing, praying, and (eventually) bell-clanging when this bit of intelligence finally sparked across the gap. Moseh winced empathetically and turned his attentions back to Jack.

  "Though they were our captives in all but name, Ed and Elsie" (here he used Jack's names for the two passengers) "might have said to us: ‘You men of Minerva are starving, your ship needs repairs, your cargo is valueless save at the mine-heads of New Spain and Peru. Only at the great ports of the King of Spain, such as Acapulco, Panama, and Lima, have you any hope of trading your quicksilver for what you so desperately need. If you are barred from those ports, you shall be exiled to a few wretched pirate-islands, for in your current plight you've scant hope of weathering Cape Horn. A few words on parchment, signed and sealed by us, determine whether you'll be welcomed as heroes or hunted down as scurvy pirates.' "

  "They might have said that," Jack agreed. "But they didn't."

  "They didn't. If they had, it would have meant we were negotiating, which was best avoided. So before the subject was even broached I went into my Cabbalist act and gave Ed and Elsie to believe that I was naught more than an errand-boy for a legion of wizards and alchemists in the Islands of Solomon. That, and the caches of quicksilver that we might or might not have buried on Maria Madre and Cabo Corrientes, put us in a stronger position than we really deserve."

  "Dappa has read their letters," Jack remarked. "He admits that their Latin is high-flown and abstruse, and that he may be overlooking much that is nuanced. But he seems to think that the survivors' accounts depict us in a favorable light."

  "At the very least we should avoid summary execution," Moseh allowed.

  "There you go again—always the optimist."

  The port of Navidad despatched a boat of its own to bring out some provisions. The only cure for scurvy was to go ashore, but since they had arrived at the Golden Gate and begun to eat the fruits of the earth again, teeth had stopped falling out and gums had pinkened. Whatever was on this boat should tide them over to Acapulco. As it turned out, the boat carried not just food, but also tidings from Madrid: King Carlos II, "The Sufferer," had finally died.

  Of course hardly anyone on Minerva cared, and in any case it was not much of a surprise, as all of Christendom had been waiting for it to happen for three decades. But as they were in the Spanish Empire now, they tried to look solemn. Edmund de Ath crossed himself. Elizabeth de Obregon covered her face and went into her cabin without saying a word. Jack naïvely supposed she was praying the rosary for her dead monarch. But when he next went to his own cabin for a cat-nap he could hear the scribble, scribble of her quill, inscribing yet more letters.

  They sailed for another week along a coast lined with cacao and vanilla plantations, and on the 28th of January came in sight of the first city they'd seen since leaving Manila in July. It was a shoal of mean little shacks that looked in danger of being shrugged into the water by the green mountains rising up behind. They could have sailed right past it, mistaking it for a wretched fishing-village, if not for the fact that a large castle stood in the middle.

  The steepness of those mountains suggested a deep-water harbor. This was confirmed by a few large ships that had come in so close to shore that they were tied up to trees! But the passage in to that harbor was winding; the barque de négoce that came out to meet them had to put her three lateen sails through any number of difficult evolutions just to get out into blue water. This barque sported two six-pounders on either side of her high stern as well as a dozen or so swivel-guns distributed around her gunwales. In other words, compared to a Dutch East Indiaman like Minerva she was essentially unarmed. But the gaudy encrustations wrapped around her stern, and the fabulously complex heraldry on her ensign, told them that this barque had been sent out by someone important: according to Elizabeth de Obregon, the castellan, who was the highest authority in Acapulco. The two survivors of the Galleon were welcomed aboard this barque. Minerva was told not to enter the harbor, but to proceed several miles down the coast to a place called Port Marques.

  Van Hoek had heard of it; Port Marques was the semi-official smugglers' port, frequented by ships that came up from Peru with pigs of silver and other contraband that it would be unseemly to unload directly beneath the windows of the Castle of Acapulco. So they passed Acapulco by, with no sense of regret, as every building there was either a mud hovel or a monastery, and a few hours later dropped anchor before Port Marques. This was even more ragged and humble, being little more than a camp inhabited by Vagabonds, blacks, mulattoes, and mestizos.

  Moseh went ashore on the first boat-load, fell on his face in the sand, and kissed it. "I will never set foot on a ship again as God is my witness!" he hollered.

  "If you are talking to God, why are you speaking Sabir?" shouted Jack, who was watching from the poop deck of Minerva.

  "God is far away," Moseh explained, "and I must rely on men to keep me honest."

  LATER DAPPA WENT ASHORE and talked to some of the black men camped on the beach. There was a group of half a dozen who had come from the same African river as he, and spoke a similar language. Each of them had been captured by other Africans and sold down the river to Bonny, where he had been branded with the trademark of the Royal Africa Company and eventually loaded on an English ship that had taken him to Jamaica.

  Each of them had come, in other words, from a part of Africa notorious for breeding lazy and rebellious slaves, and each had acquired some additional defect en route: infected eyes, gray hair, excessive gauntness, mysterous swellings, or contagious-looking skin diseases. Therefore none of the planters had wanted to buy them, or even take them for free. Obviously the captain of the slave-ship had no intention of taking such refuse slaves back to Africa and so they were simply abandoned on the dock of Kingston, where it was hoped and expected they'd die. And indeed there was no better place for it, as Kingston was perhaps the filthiest city on the planet. Most of the refuse slaves obligingly died. But each of the ones in this little band had separately made his way inland, and entered into a sort of Vagabond life, joining together in bands with escaped slaves and native Jamaicans and roving about the island stealing chickens and trying to stay one step ahead of the posses sent out after them by plantation-owners.

  This particular group had drifted to an unsettled stretch of coast towards the western tip of Jamaica, where fishing was rumored to be good. About a year later they had encountered a brig full of English adventurers sailing out of the west, i.e., from the general direction of New Spain. These Englishmen—who, to judge from their description, were likely nothing more than incompetent or luckless boca-neers—had lately been reckless enough to find a route through a barrier reef that had hitherto barred access to a certain part of the Mosquito Coast, seven hundred miles due west of Jamaica. Now they were making a foray to Kingston to collect gun-powder, musket-balls, swine, and other necessaries, so that they could go back and establish a set
tlement.

  Here the narrator—an African by the name of Amboe, with a bald head and grizzled beard—jumped over what must have been a somewhat involved negotiation, and said simply that he and a dozen of his band had decided to leave Jamaica and throw in their lot with these boca-neers, and had helped establish a rudimentary village at a place called Haulover Creek near the mouth of the river Belice. But it was a pestilential place, and the Englishmen got drunker and nastier every day, and so those who'd survived the initial rounds of diseases and hurricanes had pulled up stakes and moved inland, passing through a land of jungle-covered Pyramids (lengthy, implausible yarns deleted here), and straying across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (or so Jack—who'd been studying maps—inferred), to the Pacific Coast, and then wandering up this way.

  Acapulco, Amboe explained, was far too hot, cramped, and famished to support many Spaniards and so for most of the year its hovels were occupied by the wretched soldiers of the garrison, a few missionaries who did not care whether they lived or died, and people like these: Indians, refuse-slaves, and the like. Only when the Manila Galleon or the Lima treasure-fleet was expected did white men swarm down out of the mountains and kick out the squatters and turn Acapulco into a semblance of a real city. This had just happened a week ago, which explained why so many rabble were camped on the beach at Port Marques; but word had already gotten around that the ship was not the Manila Galleon, and disappointed merchants were already streaming out of town in droves, leaving behind empty buildings that the beach-people would soon move back into.

  Naturally all of Minerva's crew wanted to come ashore, but van Hoek only let them do so one watch at a time, and he insisted that men stand by the longboat with muskets. He was worried, in other words, that the Spaniards would try to seize the ship on some pretext, and that she would have to fight her way out onto the main and make for Galápagos or some other pirate-haven. Jack for his part was inclined to believe that the Spaniards would see things their way. If Minerva came under attack she would either flee or be sunk, and in either event the quicksilver in her holds would never arrive at the mine-heads of New Spain. And if she were not received hospitably and dealt with fairly, she could sail down the coast to Lima and the quicksilver would end up at Potosí, the greatest mine in the world.

  In any event there was a pause while the accounts of Edmund de Ath and Elizabeth de Obregon were sent by express to Mexico City, and (presumably) pondered by important people, and orders sent back by express. This ended up taking sixteen days. Van Hoek never once came ashore, but remained aboard his ship, doing sums in his cabin or pacing the poop deck with a spyglass, scanning the horizon for armadas. Vrej Esphahnian ventured into Acapulco to procure the wood and other items needed to repair Minerva's foremast. He ended up being absent for two nights and a day, and van Hoek was getting ready to send out a rescue party when a barge emerged from Acapulco Harbor's broad southeastern entrance and came their way, laden with what they wanted. Vrej was posed insouciantly on a new foremast, and explained the delay by informing them that Acapulco was that rarest of places, an important trade-port without a single Armenian, and so he had been forced to deal with slower minds.

  Minerva's idlers were now idle no more, as the new foremast had to be stepped and rigged. That procedure might have been interesting to Jack if it had been done in mid-ocean where there was nothing else to look at, but as it was, being on land had reminded him of how much he hated being aboard ship. He spent those days ashore, making friends with diverse Vagabonds and ne'er-do-wells, learning which of them were idiots and which merely independent-minded. Amboe and his band were obviously of the latter type, but most of these beach-people did not have such informative Narrations to tell, and Jack could sound them out only through carousing with them over a period of weeks. Jack had long since lost interest in carousing per se, but he recalled how it was done, and could still put on a performance of carousing that looked sincere but was in fact wholly affected, shrewd, and calculating. He was helped in this by his two sons, who really meant it.

  Gentlefolk liked to claim that horsemanship was a noble art. If that were true, then half of the renegadoes on the beach at Port Marques were bastard sons of Dukes and Princes. New Spain bred horses the way London bred fleas, and many of these mulattoes and mestizoes could ride like cavaliers, even bareback. Jack of course was the last man on earth who'd ever believe that riding well was a sign of superior breeding. But he did know that riding badly was its own punishment, and that spirited horses could smell fools and poseurs from a mile away. Some of the Port Marques crowd would entertain themselves by roping wild beach-mustangs and riding them up and down the sand, forcing them against their will to gallop into breaking waves. From a musket-shot away Jack could see the white teeth of those riders as they laughed, and later on, as they gathered around driftwood-fires to eat the food of the country (maize flat-bread wrapped around meager helpings of beans and spicy stews), he would seek those men out and try to learn something of them, and he would ply them with rum to see if they had a weakness for liquor. Of all of these, the best man, in Jack's opinion, was an African named Tomba, a member of Amboe's band. Tomba was not a refuse slave; he had escaped from a sugar plantation in Jamaica. The scars on his back confirmed part of his story, which was that he'd fled to avoid being beaten to death by an overseer. The time he'd spent on the plantation, and at the English settlement on Haulover Creek, had given Tomba some knowledge of English, and he spent several long evenings sitting by the fire with Jimmy and Danny Shaftoe talking about what sons of bitches Englishmen were in general.

  Almost three weeks after Minerva had dropped anchor at Port Marques, Edmund de Ath came out alone one morning from Acapulco, bearing sealed letters from the Viceroy. One was addressed to van Hoek and another to the Viceroy's counterpart in Lima. Van Hoek opened his in Minerva's dining cabin, in the presence of de Ath, Dappa, Jack, and Vrej.

  Moseh's vow compelled him to remain ashore. Later Jack rowed in on a skiff and found the Jew eating a taco.

  "These Vagabond-boots are longing to Stray," Jack said. "I reckon that tomorrow we will round up a posse of these vaqueros and desperadoes and begin to assemble a mule-train."

  Moseh finished chewing a bite of his taco and swallowed carefully. "The news is good, then."

  "We are all vile hereticks and profiteers, says the Viceroy, and ought to be whipped all the way to Boston…but Edmund de Ath has put in a good word for us."

  "Is that Ed's version or…"

  "It's right there in black and white in the middle of the Viceroy's letter, or so literate men assure me."

  "Very well," said Moseh, dubiously. "I do not like being beholden to that Jansenist, but—"

  "We are beholden to him anyway," said Jack. "Do you recollect the fellow we had dealings with in Sanlúcar de Barrameda?"

  "That cargador metedoro? It's been a while."

  "You don't have to remember him personally, but only the class he belonged to."

  "Spanish Catholics who front for Protestant merchants…"

  "…because hereticks are barred from doing business in Spain. You've got it."

  "The Viceroy wants our quicksilver," Moseh said, "but as long as the Inquisition is active in Mexico City, he cannot allow Protestants and a Jew to roam about transacting business in his country. And so he insists that we nominate a Papist to act as our cargador metedoro."

  "Just so," Jack said.

  "And—don't tell me—Edmund de Ath is our man. I am uneasy."

  "You are always uneasy, and more often than not, for the best of reasons," Jack said, "but for God's sake look about you and consider our situation. We must have a Catholic and that is all there is to it. There are many to choose from, but as a Belgian Jansenist, Ed is the least Catholic Catholic we are likely to find, and at least we know something about him."

  "Do we? The only person who can testify as to his character is Elizabeth de Obregon, and she's been under his spell ever since she came to."

  Jack sighed. "
Do I need to tell you that you've been out-voted?"

  Moseh flinched. "I never should have given any of you voting privileges…that was never part of the Plan."

  "We're not putting him in control of the ship," Jack said, "just allowing him to act as our front here and in Lima. He'll sail down that-a-way aboard Minerva and sell whatever quicksilver we do not off-load here. At that point, his role in the enterprise is finished. Minerva leaves him on the dock in Lima, rounds Cape Horn, and makes rendezvous with us in Vera Cruz or Havana a year or two later. Edmund de Ath can stay in Peru and try to convert the Incas to Œcumenicism, or he can come back to Mexico…it matters not to us."

  "It matters not to me, for my voyaging days have ended," said Moseh. "If Edmund de Ath tries to do any mischief I'll put on my poncho and sombrero and ride north with saddlebags full of silver."

  "Very well," Jack said, "but first you had better learn how to ride. It is more difficult than pulling on an oar."

  JULY 1701

  "YOUR HIGHNESS, WHEN I WAS a boy—rather younger than you are now, hard as that might be to imagine—I was locked out of a library for a time, and I did not care for it at all," said the bald man leading the young woman down the gallery. "I pray you understand how it has pained me to have locked you out of yours for the last week—"

  "It's not really mine, is it? The library is the property of Uncle Freddy and Aunt Figgy!"

  "But you have made it yours by spending so much time there."

  "While it was closed, you've brought me every book I asked for without delay, Doctor. So whyever should I mind?"

  "It's true, Highness, my desire to apologize to you is wholly irrational, Q.E.D."