The Rendezvous and Other Stories Read online

  It was lucky; but it was not entirely unforeseen. ‘Old Swann will not last beyond the Cape,’ his uncle had said, ‘and with any right chance the Dutch will knock one of the others on the head. In three or four voyages you will be on your own, and then, if you have the wit to escape the fever, the Dutch, the Spaniards, the Portuguese, the Sea-Malays and the Java pox, you will make your fortune, if you keep my advice in mind. Then you can sit at your ease like a lord on Fiddlers’ Green.’

  Cornelius had not looked for his luck; he had been heartily sorry for the occasions of it; yet having it put between his hands, he meant to grasp it. All the way across the Indian Ocean he had conned his instructions, had gone through and through Mr Swann’s lists, had counted and re-checked his chests of Spanish silver, his moidores, ducatoons, sequins of Venice and gold mohurs, had dived and wriggled his way through the fantastically mixed cargo in the holds; he had learned all he could from the mulatto, part Malay, part Portuguese, part Javanese; and he had read his uncle’s advice until he knew whole paragraphs by rote. But he had not been able to win the confidence of Popery, the mulatto; and he regretted that, for he was a friendly soul. Perhaps if he had made the whole voyage in the Trade’s Increase he might have done so, but he had sailed beyond Madagascar in the Clove; and with the sinking of that ship he had lost most of his intimate friends. It was not that this ship’s company was unfriendly or reserved – far from it; but Popery, or Sawney Bean, as some called him, remained aloof, in spite of their common religion; for Cornelius was a Catholic, and that, in a time when it was death for a priest to be found in England, would ordinarily have been a tie. However, Cornelius could not hang out his beliefs aboard an English ship – he had learned that much caution – and perhaps Popery did not know of them: perhaps, too, he resented Cornelius having charge of the papers: he may have hoped for promotion for himself. Perhaps it was just that he was a proud, injurious Portingale.

  Again there was a mounting tumult of cries on deck, and Cornelius heard a dull crash on the other side of the thick wooden wall behind him. After a moment of dead silence came the first mate’s furious shriek, ‘Get your — boom out of my shrouds, you whoreson black ape,’ then the captain’s cold, harsh voice cutting through the oaths and counter-shouting: ‘Mr Williams.’

  The mulatto pushed his blue face through the door. ‘Captain not coming yet,’ he said, and closed it again.

  The sound of shoving, fending-off, the orders, the groan of wood and the gurgling of churned water was succeeded by the startlingly close vision of a high, recurved prow in Cornelius’ porthole: clinging to the prow were three bearded Arabs, shaking their fists at the deck of the Trade’s Increase. They were like angry prophets, and they were so close that Cornelius could see their yellow, blood-shot eyes straining from their heads in fury as they shot their stream of words up through the air. There were more prophets in the waist of the dhow, but they were silent: they glared with dumb rage or watched in motionless indifference as the dhow laboured past the Trade’s Increase with her enormous sweeps. Cornelius noted her armament: only four guns; three brass serpentines and a demi-culverin: the Trade’s Increase could sink her with a single broadside.

  The falsetto and the bass of the Arabs died away, to rise again as the dhow tried to make her way against the tide between two junks moored inshore: now the shouting was increased by the shrill howl of Cantonese, but Cornelius’ attention was distracted by a flash of scarlet beyond the junks, a flash of scarlet threading through the masts of the proas by the landing stage, and the beating of a drum.

  That, he thought, must be the heathen duke: the rajah, as they called him here. Unless it could be the prince’s officers for the customs. No: the scarlet was on shore, not coming out to sea. On shore under the palm trees. They were playing a strange, harsh, screaming music there. Would the captain never come?

  Again Cornelius turned his mind from the delights of the unknown shore to the papers in front of him.

  ‘Some report, these Islands were once in Subjection of the King of Ternate, but whatever they once were, now they are a sort of a Common-wealth,’ his uncle had written in his clerkly hand (‘No tropes or elegant turns, you understand,’ – looking contentedly at his work before he had handed it over to his nephew – ‘Nothing but a plain, thorough-stitch account. Tropes are for learned men, not half-merchant, half-sailor, half-witted swabs like supercargoes.’ But he was quite proud of his writing, nevertheless; Cornelius had little penetration, but he knew that much.) ‘… sort of Common-wealth; yet there is one Supreme Officer, whom they call a Subandar, that appears at the Head of the State, and has the Trouble of Managing, but not the full Power of Disposing of any Public Affair, without the good Liking, and intervening Approbation of the People.

  ‘Their way of dealing is by Bahar and Cattee: the small Bahar is ten Cattees of Mace, and a hundred of Nutmegs; and the great Bahar a hundred of Mace, and a thousand of Nutmegs. And the Cattee here is 5 Pound 13 Ounces English; the prices variable.’

  This was not Sumbawa: it was Banda, and the Trade’s Increase would not be there until they had laid in their cargo of pepper; but Cornelius read on.

  ‘The Commodities requested here are Broad Cloth, Stammel, Calicoes black and red, China boxes, Basons without Brims, light colour’d Damasks, Taffatees, Velvets, Gold Chains, Plate Cups gilt, Head-pieces damask’d, Guns, Sword-blades, but not such as are back’d to the Point. There’s a great deal of Profit in bringing Gold Coyn hither; for you shall have that for the value of 70 Rials in Gold Coyn, that will cost you 90, if you pay in Rials …’ Frowning with concentration, Cornelius placed the rimless basins in his mind: they were stowed under the forepeak, beyond the cases with the small blue beads.

  ‘You have at this Place some of the best Benzoin perhaps in the World, and in great Plenty; and the glorious Gems of Pegu shine here likewise. There’s vast quantity of Silver in Bullion, that’s brought hither from Japan; but Rials of Eight are more in request, and will bring in Bullion ¼ of a Rial Profit. All your broad Stammel Cloth, Iron-works, and fine Looking-Glasses, are things that take exceedingly here, and Saunders, Sapon, Camphire, Amber, Elephants’ Teeth, Rhinocero’s and Hart’s Horn; to which add Honey, Spanish Soap, Sugar Candy, all sorts of Leather, Wax-Candles, and Pictures. Only as to Pictures, the larger they are the better, but they are not so much for Faces, as Landskip, Representations of War, amorous Intrigues, some remarkable Story of comical Fancy, as the Painter’s Invention guides him.’

  Cornelius turned on: he had all that in his head. At Soocadanna the weights are the mass, the coopang, the boosuck and the pead. At Soocadanna, diamonds. ‘They are gotten as Pearls are, by Diving; and the River most celebrated for the Search and Discovery of them is the River Lane; such a one as which any Prince that had it in his Dominions, would not have very much cause to complain, if it yielded the Country no Fish. All the trading Part of Mankind being fond of this precious Commodity, the Place never wants a Crowd of Ships, Praws and Juncks … yet the Place is in the height of its charming Lustre in April.’

  But one should watch the weighers always, they being Chinese, and apt to favour their own countrymen, in any commodity from rice to dragon’s blood.

  Cornelius turned back the pages and memorized the piece on civet, bezoars, and musk. ‘Musk. There are three Sorts of it, black, brown, and yellow; of which the first is stark naught, the second good, and the third best of all; it ought to be the Colour of the best Spikenard, and of so strong a Scent, as to be rather offensive than otherwise, especially if tasted, when the Fumes of it seem to pierce violently into the Brain, and search the Head at a wonderful Rate.’

  His uncle had opened a drawer in the Chinese cabinet and had given him a piece of yellow musk to smell. ‘Does that go to your scalp, boy? Does that make your essence quake, eh? Does that clear your intellectuals?’

  ‘Yes, Uncle John, sir.’

  ‘I hope it does, indeed,’ – shaking his head doubtfully – ‘for I am sure they want a vivifying spa
rk. It’s the headpiece that counts, boy,’ he had said, patting him on the shoulder, ‘You must think judiciously and quick. Tell me now if you remember the customs at Sumbawa.’

  Cornelius put his hands behind his back and repeated, ‘There is the prince’s custom called chukey, which is eight bags upon the hundred, rating pepper at four pieces of eight the sack, whatever price it bears. Then there is the billy, the billy …’ His voice trailed away.

  ‘Hell and death! The billabillian, moon-calf: the billabillian, you mumchance Tom a’Bedlam brain-sick zany. Swab, to forget the prime foundation of them all. Here, take the page and spell it out.’

  ‘“Then there is the Billabillian,”’ read Cornelius, ‘“which is this: If any Ship come into the Road laden, the King is to be immediately acquainted with the Sorts, Quantities, and Prices of the Commodities in her, before any part can be landed: upon which he sends his Officers to the Ship to look narrowly into her and takes of all the Sorts what he likes, perhaps at half your Price, or it may be something better, according as you can agree. So if you lade Pepper, you pay for every 6,000 sacks, 666 Rials, or else are obliged to be the King’s Chapman for as many thousand sacks, at one half, or three fourths of a Rial more than the Current Price of the Town. The Dutch indeed go a more com-com –”’

  ‘Compendious, my boy,’ said his uncle, nodding pleasantly at the word.

  ‘“The Dutch indeed go a more compendious way to work; and to avoid the trouble of the Duty and the Searching, agree with the Officer so much in the Gross, for the Lading of the Ship, which is generally about seven or eight hundred Rials.”’

  ‘Remember that, Cornelius. Remember that, and you will make your fortune yet. It is not your whoreson sixteen shillings a month that will give you all this –’ He waved expansively at the comfortable room with its Cordova-leather hangings and its carved plaster ceiling with the Virtues and a Cornucopia; and his wave carried Cornelius’ mind beyond the windows to the walled garden with its espaliered fruit trees, and out of the garden to the meadows that sloped gently down to the Thames, where his uncle would sit with his pipe in one hand and a glass in the other, watching the ships going up to London from the sea, or listening to the bells from Dartford over the water, or Gravesend.

  ‘– it is not your whoreson pay: it is the billabillian that you ought to go down on your knees and thank the Lord for. That and your own trading afterwards – afterwards, mind – when the ship has had her due.’

  ‘But Uncle John, sir,’ said Cornelius nervously, ‘it is – is it quite right?’

  ‘Blood and damnation!’ cried the old gentleman, turning from red to blue. ‘What have we here? A snuffling, canting, talking-through-the-nose Puritan? A Praise-the-Lord-with-Joyfulness Shufflebottom like the poxy, snivelling French dog of a conventicle-haunting text-splitter I kicked out of the Goat and Compasses the other day? Rot the boy. Of course it is quite right. Do you think I would do it if it were not? Blast your eyes.’ He fumed in silence for a while; then recovering his good humour and his normal scarlet face he went on, though with still a trace of the exasperation that talking with Cornelius often brought into his voice, ‘It is good for the merchants, good for the prince’s officers, good for the captain and good for the supercargo. Everybody, apart from a few sickly rogues who should never have seen the light of day, much less been breeched, everybody does it. Why, kiss my hand, I remember Evans, of the Roebuck, when he was sent off for cloves to Pulo-Temba, making himself a purse out of the Sabandar’s duty there and another out of the rooba at Timor. He kept it close, he and his captain, until he was knocked o’ the head in a fight at Jakarta, and then he told us before he died. He was a great man, and his merchants gave him a piece of plate worth fifty pound, as a gratification for looking after their trade so well, in the year ‘twenty-three. And he was one of those quiet dogs – no Java girls, no arrack for him – never moved without an Amen in his mouth and the Good Book in his pocket. That’s a good man, I believe? He’d bury you a dead seaman as trim as any parson in the land. No, no: you will see old Swann, if he lives the voyage, or Adams if he don’t, give the prince’s officer, the rajah’s Arapotee, as they say in those parts, a round five hundred pieces of eight for the Clove’s billabillian. And the prince’s officer, this Arapotee, will give him a quittance in his hand for nine hundred, or maybe a thousand clear, and he will share the difference with the captain: you will get a score to yourself if you stand by, and the next voyage you will get more, and more the next after that, until in the end, with God’s blessing, you will have it in your own hands to make the shares. Then, if you keep clear of the Dutch in the Sunda Straights, half a dozen voyages will make you, and you can set up for a squire by land.

  ‘Dear Lord,’ he said, blowing out a cloud of smoke some minutes later, ‘If Captain Johnson of the Clove could hear you a-doubting of the billabillian, he would have you overboard when you were five minutes out of soundings, or keep you to sell to the Sultan of Cayalucca. You must indeed want wit, my poor moon-calf nephew, not to understand that it saves the merchants’ goods and money. If you open your hatches and break bulk among those land-sharks – for all those heathens are thieves inveterate, knowing no better – you lose a good eighth, seeing they all have twelve hands apiece, like their idols. And at the end of it they give you no thanks for having made them search, and they buy up half your cargo for their king at their own price, which is a sinful waste. No: it saves the merchant’s pocket, and it makes a wastrel venture a profitable voyage. It gives the Arapotee a noble present. It gives the captain and the supercargo a rightful bounty on their wages – and nobody, not even the merchants, expects them to wind their way across the world’s great sea for hardtack and a few ha-pence. No: they may take the billabillian, and they may trade afterwards once the ship has got her belly full: that’s right and just. Don’t you be wiser than the rest of the world, Cornelius, and don’t you let your captain suspect he’s gotten a formal, psalm-singing precisian aboard when you come to be on your own, or by God, it will be the last voyage you ever make.’

  He was benign and calm again by now. When he was not blue in the face with rage he was always kind. He had taken in his widowed sister and her little brood of Papists – and a dangerous charge it might always be – and at this very moment, thought Cornelius, working out the change in time for the longitude, he was probably singing all the decent words he knew of a song while Sue and Bridget piped along beside him. He was choleric at times, that could not be denied, and he hated Puritans like poison, though he never went farther into the parish church than the bell-tower; but these were only squalls on a gentle sea. And it was not only a rough, careless, sailor’s kindness that bound Cornelius to him; it was much more. For example, he had not only found his nephew his place in the Clove and his outfit, but he had spent days and weeks in drawing up his pages of advice: it was the fruit of great experience, and to the day Cornelius sailed he kept adding notes. There was one here now, beautifully written in the margin of the pages about Timor. ‘Balee, to the westward of Lambock, in 8 degrees of south Latitude, yields great Plenty of Wax, which is made up in large Cakes, from eighteen to thirty Rials to the Peecul, as the Time serves. There’s a great deal of Deceit, very often, in this Commodity; and to be sure that you are not cheated, the best Way is to break it, and see whether it looks agreeable within. The Wares to be carried hither, are Chopping-Knives, China Frying-Pans, China Bells, small Bugles, Porcelains, colour’d Taffatees (but no Blacks), Pieces of Silver beaten flat and thin, and of the breadth of one’s Hand; and your Broad Cloth of Venice Red and all your Coromandel Cloths are topping Commodities here; but the most vendible sorts are the Gobarees, the Pintadoes, and the fine Tappies of St. Thomas. There may be good Profit made of the Trade to this Island, in the Teeth of the false Dutch, for the Chinese have given four for one, to some of our English that ventur’d with them thither.’

  His uncle had written that in front of the roaring fire at Christmas, but Cornelius, thinking of him now, saw him
sitting in his meadow, listening placidly to the Dartford bells and waving the stem of his pipe to count the changes. Then he realized that it was something on shore that had brought this image so sharp and clear into his mind. He raised his head and listened: yes, in that queer, tip-tilted temple under the flaming trees someone was beating on a gong, a rhythmic boom-boom-boom that came echoing over the water like the passing bell at home.

  ‘The Dutch were highly disgusted at our coming hither, and as inquisitive to know who directed us to this Place, threatening all with Plagues and Death,’ he read. But he could not keep his mind to his book. He looked out to the brilliant light again, to the diminished world, yet so much more brilliant and animated for its confining frame. The gong in the temple was beating still, and a little wind was moving the palm trees: the splashes of moving colour up behind there must be the market place, where the men from the European ships, the Chinese junks and the Arab dhows met with the Malays, the Formosans, and the Javanese. If only the captain would come he could go ashore. Cornelius had a desperate feeling that tomorrow it might all be gone: he was so longing to be there that he could hardly sit.

  ‘Mr O’Leary,’ said the captain, ‘have you the lists for the after-hold? And the papers for the customs men? They are putting off from the shore.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Here is the after-hold.’ Cornelius dropped it in an excess of zeal: he was nervous of the tall, yellow-faced captain, and he was not used to being called Mr O’Leary.

  ‘Very good, Mr O’Leary,’ said the captain, nodding over the list of bales. The mulatto came in and stood by the porthole, looking out and darkening the sun. ‘Customs man coming soon,’ he said. ‘Billabillian.’