“Before we left, you wouldn’t tell us what the cargo was. Now you tell me we’re being paid bonuses to salvage a cargo of perfume?” A rugged, gray-haired fellow in oilskins said at Sabatelli’s side.
“Not perfume, a valuable component of perfume. We’re talking about ambergris, gray ambergris. A redundancy, my good man, since the word ‘ambergris’ is French for ‘gray’ amber.” Sabatelli found himself getting grandiloquent just thinking about the extraordinary substance.
“And we’re salvaging barrels of it. Worth more by weight than gold.”
Sabatelli tilted his head as if he was sniffing the sweet odor of wealth. “The stuff turns up in the tropics. Came upon it in Hawaii. It took a bit to gather some business partners and float a few notes. Great day in the morning, it’s worth a king’s ransom. The French use it for pills and candles and hair ointments. The Turks carry it to Mecca. The Chinese are paying top dollar and want it to make pomanders. Dash it, there’s not a man on this ship, other than me, knows what a pomander is.”
The master diver moved over to where the others were standing to be sure his company had been paid in advance, in Mexican silver.
“Never heard of this hamper-grease and I think this fellow drinks,” he said with an air of confidentiality.
A diminutive sampan bobbed in the waves drifting sideways to the icy wind, nearly broaching. A small, improvised pole with the pre-annexation flag of Korea heightened its visibility. The currents of the East Sea, as it was known locally, carried it through a light snow squall. The sampan was directly on the steamship route between Pusan and Kobe. In it were three very simple baskets devoid of fancy edging.
Nestled in each basket—and well preserved by the sub-freezing temperatures—lay a cleanly severed, and very pale, human head. Two heads were Asian. One with a cauliflower ear, and the second—perhaps the object of some grisly humor—with a pair of ill-fitting glasses on the tip of its nose. The third head was Occidental, a gentleman of means, and though the others were expressionless, this one held an expression of deep surprise. The hat that belonged to the third head had blown off and rested in the bilges. It was a strawboater with a distinctive blue and red band.
A statement had been made. To some, a message in a bottle would have been the time-honored method for casting a communication adrift—to be read by the random discoverer—but to the apparently cold-hearted originators a more dramatic form of message had seemed more appropriate. It was, after all, “make see pidgin.”
POSTLUDE
Naval Constructor Richard Pearson Hobson, hero of the Spanish-American War, skippered the blockship Merrimac into Havana harbor, where he failed to block the channel, was captured, and then exchanged. He was considered one of the three great naval heroes of that war, but not by all. He later became a member of the House of Representatives unpopular for his stands on women’s suffrage, alcohol, drugs, the black soldiers in the Brownsville riots, and ironically for predicting war with Japan. In 1933, he was awarded the Medal of Honor for his service aboard Merrimac. He was in no way related to the hero of Jade Rooster who borrowed the name at a recruiter’s suggestion.
There was no collier, Pluto. There was a Saturn of similar size and history, but her crew was entirely merchant marine. The U.S. Navy authorized naval personnel to serve aboard colliers, but the Navy was short of officers and men during this period and chose to use naval personnel they had aboard the combatant ships. The Naval Collier Service became the Naval Auxiliary Service in 1912. Asian merchant sailors aboard colliers were paid half what their counterparts received during this period, but in fairness that pay rate was high by Asian standards.
Baltimore, veteran of the Battle of Manila Bay, had left the Pacific and was in reserve in the Atlantic by the time portrayed in the Jade Rooster. Several sailors recruited in China and serving in the United States Navy participated in the Battle of Manila Bay aboard various ships, but they could not apply for U.S. citizenship under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. They had fought for the U.S. but could not hold its citizenship. Admiral Dewey was disturbed by this situation and wrote several letters to Congress, to no avail.
Exclusion was a concern to the Japanese as well and the source of tension between the U.S. and Japan. Exclusion of Japanese at the time of the events of described herein occurred under the “Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1908” which became Federal law under the Immigration Act of 1924.
Buck dancing was the predecessor of tap-dancing. Ragtime music has withstood the test of time and minstrel shows have not. Josephus Daniels did not eliminate liquor Navy-wide until 1914. The distinction between right and left sleeve rates was eliminated after World War II.
The Office of Naval Intelligence was the U. S. Navy’s primary source of intelligence from its establishment in the late 19th Century until the establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947. Its contributions to naval successes in the Pacific during WWII were invaluable.
The New York Naval Militia is one of the oldest Naval Militias in the country. Its members served in the Spanish-American War and have served in every naval conflict since.
There was a Captain George M. Colvocoresses, graduate of Norwich Academy Class of ’31, who wrote a book on his Antarctic explorations and sued Admiral Farragut over prize money earned at Mobile Bay. He was a Greek orphan adopted by an American naval family. He was allegedly murdered in Bridgeport, Connecticut under suspicious circumstance. A George P. Colvocoresses, also of Norwich University, Class of ’66, is listed as a U.S.N. midshipman by the Norwich Academy webpage and I believe rose to the rank of Rear Admiral USN.
The state of Connecticut was the center of arms and sewing machine manufacture during most of the 19th and 20th Centuries. It was long known as the home of the insurance industry, an industry which originated around insuring cargoes. Health and life insurance came later.
The pneumatic dynamite gun aboard Vesuvius was one of the U.S. Navy’s earliest procurement disasters. The weapon could only be trained by swinging the entire ship and the ship was a shiphandler’s nightmare. The weapon was shortly overtaken by technology. Perhaps things would have gone better, some said, if she had been named after an American, rather than a foreign volcano. Then again we were beginning to see ourselves as a global navy.
Shanghai fell to the Japanese in 1937 and then to the Communists in 1947. If it were not famous by the 1930’s, Marlene Dietrich made it notorious. “It took the company of more than one man to earn me the name of ‘Shanghai Lil.’” It is one of the world’s largest cities and the only large city whose name is also a verb.
Educator Jigoro Kano, father of judo, was an educator and a member of the International Olympic Committee. He died in 1938 on a return voyage from an IOC meeting in Cairo. Judo became an Olympic sport in 1964.
From a world history standpoint, neither the Japanese nor the Koreans monopolized the practice of execution by beheading and it could be said the French improved upon it slightly by attaching the art of knitting to its ceremonial aspects. However at the turn of the last century, Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado had immortalized the practice as one peculiarly Eastern in Western minds. To the north, the practice left its mark on the Korean landscape at Choltu-san (Chop Heads Mountain) where 8,000 Korean Christians were beheaded. The Middle Kingdom continued the practice with enthusiasm and the scrapbooks of Asiatic Fleet sailors of the ’Twenties and ’Thirties were replete with Chinese execution photos taken with Brownie cameras. The captured Allied commandos who participated in the second raid on Singapore during WWII were beheaded. It has been argued that the Japanese considered this was an honored, warrior’s death.
Ambergris is no longer used in perfumes.
The Japanese subjugation of Korea was, if anything, more brutal than portrayed. Missionary school educated Koreans have provided a disproportionate portion of Korea’s leadership beginning in the Japanese period and since. The Republic of South Korea was one of th
e 20th Century’s economic miracles. Ironically, a portion of this miracle was derived from the more positive aspects of the Japanese dark period.
In early May, 1883, Emily Warren Roebling was the first person to cross the completed Brooklyn Bridge. “…She and a coachman had crossed over from Brooklyn in a new Victoria, its varnish gleaming in the sunshine. She had taken a live rooster along with her, as a sign of victory, and from one end of the bridge to the other, the men had stopped their work to cheer and lift their hats as she came riding by.” After 14 years and 27 deaths, the Brooklyn Bridge over the East River was open, connecting the cities of New York and Brooklyn.
Her husband, Washington Roebling, the driving force behind the construction of the bridge had been confined to a bed in a darkened room for the past eleven years. Her husband while establishing the footings for the bridge had unknowingly contracted caisson’s disease, an ailment which would be more commonly known among divers as “the bends.” After her husband became bedridden, Mrs. Roebling had served as his intermediary supervising the work and reporting to her husband and the bridge trustees. Thousands from Brooklyn and Manhattan Island attended the dedication ceremony with President Chester A. Arthur and New York Governor Grover Cleveland. Designed by her late father-in-law John A. Roebling, the Brooklyn Bridge was the largest suspension bridge of its age and was considered the foremost engineering project of the 19th Century. A freak accident during the planning of the bridge had destroyed his health, too, and quickly claimed his life.
A rooster was the well-known symbol of victory in the late 19th Century and the early 20th Century.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Originally published by Broadsides Press.
Copyright © 2006, 2009 by R. L. Crossland
Cover design by Open Road Distribution
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3068-7
This edition published in 2017 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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New York, NY 10038
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