The Chrysanthemum, the Cross, and the Dragon

by Iver P. Cooper

  But it seemed like a lot of work considering how many miners were left in the party. And if they were planning to leave soon, there was even less reason to build a dam.

  A further problem, he added, was that Juan and Mingyu's party had ventured up the Jinguashi River with a view toward prospecting and panning, not heavier-duty mining. The miners had intended to resort to more aggressive methods than simple panning once gold was found, but the equipment for it had naturally been left behind on the ships. And thus was now either destroyed or in Captain Huang's hands, wherever he might be just now.

  After some further discussion, Juan clapped his hands twice, and the miners sauntered over. As the lone foreigner in the expedition, with no comrades to give him physical support, his authority was derived by his relationship to Mingyu, Captain Huang, Zheng Bao, and Zheng Zhilong. And since all save Mingyu were far away, that authority was a bit attenuated. Still, they came, and Mingyu translated for him.

  "We will concentrate our efforts for the next three days on the right tributary, where the slopes are safer," he commanded. "If we do not find gold there in that time span, we will switch back to the left tributary, assuming it hasn't rained in the meantime."

  He sent Mingyu and Cut-Nose back to the shore. Hopefully they could salvage and rebuild the heavy equipment, or Captain Huang would return.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Hour after hour, the Chinese miners patiently sifted through the river sand and gravel, looking for gold. Their technique was different from what Zheng Zhilong's up-time allies might have expected. The Chinese didn't use a circular metal pan and nearly submerge it. Rather, their pans, called po chi, were wooden, with a rectangular opening and a triangular cross-section. That meant that either short end could be used as a spout for pouring out the water. And since the wood floated, the panner could take advantage of its buoyancy and ease the strain on his back, shoulders, and arms.

  The workers were not, of course, all expert panners when they came to Taiwan. Some were lode gold miners and had to learn how to pan for the first time. But they copied the experts as best they could.

  On the second day, the miners found gold. These were just the tiny particles that the Chinese called "chaff gold," but it was still confirmation of Mike Song's story. Juan left the senior miner in charge, and headed back to the coast with this trophy—he wanted to be the one to tell Mingyu.

  Chapter 22

  Mingyu was pleased. Her party had discovered that some of the mining equipment—sluice boards, riffle boxes, rockers, and even a windlass—had floated and proved to be recoverable. The first three of these were used to wash gravel, and the windlass was used to lift gravel to the surface.

  "Alas, if any of the ceramic jars that were used to store mercury survived the wreck unbroken, they still lie at the bottom of Yinyang Bay," Cut-Nose told her. That was unfortunate, because as she had learned from conversations with the senior miner, mercury had the marvelous property of amalgamating with gold. Even the tiniest of gold particles—gold flour—could be captured in this way, and then released from the paste by judicious heating. The mercury itself could be used again and again.

  An alternative method of capturing gold flour would have been to lay felt over the bottom of a sluice, where its fibers would catch the fine gold. But the felt that had been brought over on the wrecked ships had been water-logged so long that it had disintegrated.

  Mingyu's sailors used the waste wood to build a small raft, and they were using that as a vantage point to study the wrecks and decide whether it might be worth diving to salvage additional items. Mingyu was on the raft, on hands and knees, peering into the murky water, when she heard a commotion from shore.

  She got up slowly, not wanting to cause the raft to flip and pitch her into the Yinyang Sea. "Juan!" she cried, and waved to him.

  "Get us back to camp!" she ordered the sailors with her, and they paddled and poled the raft back to the mouth of the Jinguashi River.

  Juan hugged Mingyu, then showed her the gold.

  "Look what we found!" he said, and grinned.

  That was, of course, excuse for them to hug again. No kissing, though. There were limits to what a Chinese woman could do in public, even in the wilds of Taiwan.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Naturally, having found some gold in the waters of the right tributary, it was tempting to forget about the left one. And indeed that was Juan's initial inclination. But the senior miner had urged that they return to the left tributary as soon as it was safe to do so. Since the water flowed down a steeper slope, it was faster and more likely to carve gold out of the yet-to-be-discovered source.

  Mingyu agreed with the senior miner that they should return to the left tributary, but her reasons were different.

  "I do not want to return to Uncle Dragon and tell him we only explored half of the river. And besides, I think the souls of the miners that were killed by the landslide will rest easier in this strange land if we vindicate their deaths by finding gold where they had been looking."

  Having decided to continue mining, there was now the question of whether to build the wing dam. The senior miner told them, "Wing dams let placer miners access the richer pay layers deeper in the stream bed. But to be worth the labor, they needed to be constructed as early in the dry season as possible. Once the big rains came, the works will be flooded."

  They tried to get some guidance about this from their native guide, but to no avail. His people did not have a calendar, and he could not tell them how many days grace they could expect. Juan, Mingyu, and the senior miner ultimately decided that it was better to get the wing dam done than to fritter away the time worrying how long it would last.

  So, as the senior miner had proposed, they converted the accidental and imperfect dam formed by the landslide into a proper wing dam. That meant laying down gravel on the upstream side and moving rocks downstream and cross-stream as needed to form an enclosed working area. The windlass came in very handy in this regard. The result was, to a miner's eye, still a very sloppy dam, but workable nonetheless. And the required labor was much less than if they had constructed a wing dam from scratch. The only downside was that there was some contamination of the stream bed with material from the landslide, but this material was pretty obvious.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Captain Huang and the Golden Venture returned a few days later. The lookout Mingyu had posted sounded a horn as soon as the ship rounded the cape, and Juan and Mingyu hurried downstream to meet him. Mingyu nearly twisted her ankle, but Juan steadied her in time.

  By the time they arrived at the beach, Captain Huang's dinghy was pushing through the breakers.

  "I am glad you are safe, daughter."

  "And you, father, you triumphed over wind and wave."

  "Thanks to Mazu." He turned to Juan, and added gruffly, "I see that you, too, are a survivor."

  "More than that," said Juan. "We found gold. Well, gold dust at any rate."

  "Well.... That's a start, at least."

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  The additional resources and labor brought by the Golden Venture made the mining easier, of course. Captain Huang had jars of mercury and ready-made mining equipment, and the miners put them to use. It wasn't long before they collected more gold dust.

  A few days later, Juan's miners, working on the left tributary, the scene of the landslide, were more richly rewarded.

  One of them ran his fingers through the material collected by a cradle rocker. "What this?"

  A moment later, he was dancing in the water, sending up little splashes.

  Juan hurried over. "What did you find?" He had learned those words of Chinese quite early in the expedition.

  "This!"

  The miner spread out his palm. On it rested a piece of "dog-head" gold—a large nugget.

  The rest of Juan's team cheered, and a runner was sent to bring the good news to Mingyu up on the right tributary.

  In the meantime, despite Juan's half-hearted efforts to get the men back
to work, an impromptu celebration had started.

  Mingyu came at last, eyes shining.

  He showed her the find. "Now that should impress Bao the Panther," he said.

  "It will impress even Uncle Dragon," Mingyu told him.

  Chapter 23

  Year of the Pig, Ninth Month (October 11 to November 9, 1635)

  Two successive storms drove the miners away from the left tributary wing dam, and when they returned, it was in a state such that the senior miner advised abandoning it for the season.

  Captain Huang decided it was time to return to Keelung and report the discovery. While the gold found so far was not enough to pay for the expedition's expenses to date, it was far more than had ever been found in Spanish Taiwan, and it was completely "off the books" insofar as the Ming government was concerned. Captain Huang agreed with Juan and Mingyu that Bao the Panther and Zheng the Dragon would be pleased.

  Once the Golden Venture had been laboriously worked out of Yinyang Bay, the wind was fair for the return to Keelung.

  They arrived in time for the Double Nine Festival. Mingyu explained the festival to Juan: "Long ago, there was a man who was studying with a Taoist immortal. The immortal told him that on the ninth day of the ninth month, disaster would come to his home village, and that he must go home immediately. He and his family must drink chrysanthemum wine, tie red bags with sprigs of dogwood around their arms, and climb to the top of a mountain, or they would perish. They did as the immortal advised, and when they finally returned to their village, everyone, and even the dogs and chickens, were dead."

  "Well, there are no lack of mountains here on Taiwan," said Juan. "But after having part of a mountain fall on me, I'd rather stay in the lowlands this time around, if that's all right."

  Mingyu laughed. 'There's more than one way to 'ascend the heights.' We can eat gao." It turned out that gao could mean "height" or "cake," depending on which character was used; the pronunciation was the same.

  There were many people out celebrating. It had been over a year since the Zheng family had bought Keelung from the Spanish, and the Chinese population had increased severalfold. Times were tough in Fujian, where agriculture was rather hard-scrabble.

  Captain Huang, Mingyu and Juan were invited to the governor's House, where Bao had them served with a nine-layer gao, a veritable tower.

  Juan bit into the cake, which was in the shape of a pagoda. "Yum!" he pronounced. "This building is under siege, and I think it will fall quite quickly."

  Bao told Juan that some scholars believed that the custom dated back to a time when people went up to the mountains to act as lookouts, ready to warn their countrymen if an army approached to seize the recent harvest.

  "Now, enough pleasantries. How did your expedition fare?"

  Juan brought out the first nugget that had been found. Mingyu and Captain Huang had insisted that he be the one to present it to Bao since they had less to prove than Juan did.

  "Marvelous!" said Bao as he hefted it. "When you picked it up, did thunder roar up above?"

  "Uh, no," admitted Juan.

  "Well, one day, storytellers will tell folk of the gold strike at Keelung, and I assure you that they will say that there was thunder."

  Anhai

  Tenth Month (November 10-December 8, 1635)

  Captain Huang collected a cargo of sugarcane, sulfur, and deer hides in Keelung and sailed to Anhai with Juan and Mingyu. Bao the Panther wanted the gold find reported to Zheng Zhilong, "Brother Dragon," at the earliest opportunity.

  There, they discovered that the admiral was not in Anhai, or even Fuzhou, but up north in Hangzhou. At this time of year, with the northeast monsoon fully established, it was senseless to try to sail there by sea. It would take almost two months, sailing three-quarters of the way around Taiwan and then approaching Hangzhou bay from well to the east. Their best option was to take the land route the miners had been sent on, but in reverse. Captain Huang's younger brother, who lived in Anhai, took temporary command of the Golden Venture—there was no way that the Huang family was going to let it sit idle in Anhai while Captain Huang was off at Hangzhou—and the threesome set out for Hangzhou.

  The Golden Venture dropped them off in Fuzhou, the provincial capital, which made even Xiamen look small. But they didn't have time to linger there.

  They took a boat up the Min River and worked their way over to the Xianxia Pass.

  It was the most direct route between the provinces of Fujian and Zhejiang, where Hangzhou was located, but the mountain crossing was narrow and tortuous. Most merchants traveling between the two provinces made their crossing further southwest, at the Fenshui Pass. There, the silks and ironware of Fuzhou and the indigo and sugar of Quanzhou headed north to Zhejiang on a daily basis, and there were many inns, courier stations, toll booths, and government patrol posts. And that was why they were avoiding Fenshui; there was too much risk that some official would object to Juan's passage.

  The journey was a chance for Juan to be in Captain Huang's company when they were not on-board ship, that is to say, when he was a fellow traveler rather than the ultimate authority.

  While they were trudging along one trail, he asked, "So, Captain Huang, if you don't mind my asking: why did you become a mariner?"

  "Our people say that Fujian is eight parts mountain to one part sea and one part fields. We import most of our food, and there are only two ways to make a living: challenging the mountains or jumping over the sea. I did as my father and grandfather did—I went to sea. And, since I had no son, my daughter Mingyu followed in my footsteps.

  "And I have a question for you, Lieutenant. Why did you come halfway across the world?"

  "It was the result of a chain of coincidences. In my home town, in Galicia, we had two bad harvests in a row, leaving me a starving, penniless gentilhombre. Necessity drove me to the army. Because of my honorable birth I was enrolled as a particulares, a gentleman-ranker. Since I could expect the army to feed me, I gave my enlistment bonus to my parents."

  To this Captain Huang gave a nod of approval.

  "When my captain completed his enlistment quota, we were marched to Seville. There, we learned that we were destined for service in Mexico. Until then, I had expected to join the Army of Flanders."

  "Isn't Mexico where the galleons come from?" asked Captain Huang.

  "Yes, they sail from Acapulco with silver and return from Manila with Chinese silk."

  "So how did you end up in Manila?"

  "In Mexico, I happened to run into someone from my home town. He was a merchant who traveled with the galleons. He told me that I could expect to become an officer if I volunteered for assignment to the Philippines. The pay would be higher and the cost of living lower. And, of course, my status would be higher. My merchant friend put in a good word for me, and I was assigned to the Manila galleon, which of course is the most prestigious one, and the one offering the most opportunity for advancement. I suppose I should use the past tense."

  He straightened still further and squared his shoulders. "I have told all this to your daughter. She says that each link in the chain was improbable, and for us to have been brought together, we must have been destined by Heaven to meet."

  Her father just snorted.

  Zheng Family Office, Hangzhou

  Admiral Zheng Zhilong held the gold nugget from Taiwan against the light.

  "You three have done well indeed. I will have further instructions for you shortly. In the meantime"—he handed them some money—"go enjoy yourselves."

  Juan coughed. "Admiral, there's a private matter I'd like to discuss with you. About my terms of service."

  "I see. Captain Huang, Mingyu, you are excused, but please come here at sunset for dinner."

  After they left, Zhilong motioned for Juan to speak.

  "Admiral, I trust that you are pleased with what I have done for you to date."

  "My boy, that is without question."

  "You are perhaps aware that Mingyu and I have been co
urting?"

  Zhilong's teeth flashed. "It has come to my attention, yes."

  "We would like to marry. And she is willing to marry in the Catholic faith. Since we are not living in Manila any more, conversion would not interfere with her, uh, business activities. And I have in turn agreed to follow the Jesuit position with regard to ancestral rites. For that matter, we have decided that your Matsu, the protector of seamen, is plainly Saint Anne, and of course Guanyin is just another name for the Virgin Mary."

  The admiral smiled. "I entertain similar beliefs myself. I was baptized Nicholas Gaspard. What is the problem?"

  "Her father will not consent. He says that I am penniless, cut off from the support of my own family, and in the service of two masters, you and the king of Spain. Mingyu suggests that with your support, he would come around."

  Zhiling smiled. "The Jesuit Fathers in Macau told me the parable of your Emperor Alexander and the Gordian Knot. And I have just the sword to solve this problem. You will write out your resignation from Spanish service for me to have delivered to Cebu, and I will appoint you to command the garrison at Santo Domingo. I want to send settlers there and beef up sulfur production. Indeed, I want to establish a powder mill there...." Zhilong scratched his chin. "Hmm, what do you know about mortars?"

  "Mortars?" Juan's response held a note of surprise. "As much as any officer who is not an artillerist would know."

  "Well, I may need you to become an artillerist. Do you speak English? German? Dutch?"

  "I speak Dutch and Portuguese in addition to Spanish, and I can make myself understood in Italian."

  "I know that you met Colonel von Siegroth back in Anhai."

  Juan nodded. "We were introduced. I spent most of my time with the up-timers. Especially Jim Saluzzo."

  "I am not sure how long I’ll have you stay here, but for now, I want you to stick to him like a barnacle and learn all you can about the proper use of mortars and other siege artillery. I think the mortars I bought from the Swedish East Asia Company are the key to driving the Dutch out of Fort Zeelandia, indeed out of Taiwan altogether, one day. A goal we share with your former employers."