“So the curtain has come down on your performance. Now, a man in your position might feel like a barnacle-unable to leave the ship-an annoyance to mariners-but on Minerva there is a job for everyone,” says Dappa, leading him down the midships staircase to the gundeck.
Daniel’s not paying attention. A momentous rearrangement has taken place since Daniel was last here. All of the obstructions that formerly cluttered the space have been moved elsewhere or thrown overboard to create rights-of-way for the cannons. These had been lashed up against the inside of the hull, but now they’ve been swung round ninety degrees and each aimed at its gunport. As they are maneuvering on Cape Cod Bay, miles from the nearest Foe, those gunports are all closed for now. But like stage-hands laboring in the back of a theatre, the seamen are hard at work with diverse arcane tools, viz. lin-stocks, quoins, gunner’s picks, and worming-irons. One man’s got what looks like a large magnifying-glass, except without the glass-it’s an empty circle of iron on a handle. He sits astride a crate of cannonballs, heaving them out one at a time and passing them through the ring to gauge them, sorting them into other crates. Others whittle and file round blocks of wood, called sabots, and strap cannonballs to them. But anyone carrying a steel blade is distinctly unwelcome near the powder-barrels, because steel makes sparks.
One sailor, an Irishman, is talking to one of the Plymouth whaleboat pirates captured this morning. A cannon is between the two men, and when a cannon is between two men, that is what they talk about. “This is Wapping Wendy, or W.W., or dub-dub as we sometimes dub her in the heat of battle, though you may call her ‘darling’ or ‘love of my life’ but never ‘Wayward Wendy’ as that lot-” glowering at the crew of another gun, “Mr. Foote,” “-like to defame her.”
“Is she? Wayward?”
“She’s like any other lass, you must get to know her, and then what might seem inconstant is clearly revealed as a kind of consistency-faithfulness even. And so the first thing you must know about our darling girl is that her bore tends up and to larboard of her centerline. And she’s a tight one, is our virginal Wendy, which is why we on the dub-dub crew must keep a sharp eye for undersized balls and husband ’em carefully…”
Someone on the crew of “Manila Surprise” nudges that gun’s port open for a moment, and sun shines in. But Manila Surprise is on the larboard side of the ship. “We are sailing southwards!?” Daniel exclaims.
“No better way to run before a north wind,” Dappa says.
“But in that direction, Cape Cod is only a few miles away! What sort of an escape route is that?”
“As you have reckoned, we shall have to work to windwards eventually in order to escape from Cape Cod Bay,” Dappa says agreeably. “When we do, Teach’s fleet will be tacking along with us. But his ships are fore-and-aft rigged and can sail closer to the wind, and make better headway, than our dear Minerva, a square-rigger. Advantage Teach.”
“Shouldn’t we head north while we can, then?”
“He would catch us in a matter of minutes-his entire fleet together, working in concert. We want to fight Teach’s ships one at a time if we can. So southwards it is, for now. Running before the wind in full sail, we are faster than they. So Teach knows that if he pursues us to the south we may lose him. But he also knows that we must wheel about and work northwards before long-so he will spread out a sort of picket-line and wait for us.”
“But will Teach not anticipate all of this, and take pains to keep his fleet together?”
“In a well-disciplined fleet, pursuing Victory, that’s how it would go. But that is a pirate-fleet, in pursuit of plunder, and by the rules and account-books of piracy, the lion’s share goes to the ship that takes the prize.”
“Ah-so the captain of each ship has incentive to split away and attack us individually.”
“Just so, Dr. Waterhouse.”
“But would it not be foolhardy for a little sloop to engage a ship with all-this?” Daniel gestures down the length of the gundeck-a bustling bazaar where cannonballs, sabots, and powder-kegs, lies, promises, and witticisms are being exchanged lustily.
“Not if the ship is undermanned, and the captain a senile poltroon. Now, if you’ll just follow me down into the hold-don’t worry, I’ll get this lantern lit, soon as we are away from the gunpowder-there, that’s it. She’s a tidy ship, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Beg pardon? Tidy? Yes, I suppose, as ships go…” says Dr. Waterhouse, finding Dappa, sometimes, too subtle-an excess of quicksilver in the constitution.
“Thank you, sir. But ’Tis a disadvantage, when we have to fight with blunderbusses. The virtue of a blunderbuss, as you may know, is to make a weapon out of whatever nails, pebbles, splinters, and fragments might be lying about-but here on Minerva we make a practice of sweeping that matter up, and throwing it overboard, several times daily. At times like this we do regret that we neglected to hoard it.”
“I know more than you imagine of blunderbusses. What do you want me to do?”
“In a little while, one of the men’ll be teaching you how to fuze mortar-bombs-but we’re not quite ready for that just yet-now I would ask you to go down into the hold and-”
Dr. Waterhouse doesn’t believe, until he’s down there, what Dappa tells him next. He hasn’t seen the hold yet, and reckons it’ll be like the shambolic Repository at the Royal Society-but no. The great casks and bales are stacked, and lashed in place, with admirable neatness, and there is even a Diagram tacked to the staircase bulkhead in which the location of each object is specified, and notes made as to what’s stored there and when it was done. Underneath, under a subheading labelledbilge, van Hoek himself has scratched “out-moded china-keep handy.”
Dappa has pulled two sailors away from what they’ve been doing the last half-hour: standing by a gunport carrying on a learned discourse about an approaching pirate-sloop. The sailors considered this to be time well spent, but Dappa felt otherwise. These two spend a minute consulting the Diagram, and Daniel realizes with moderate astonishment that they both know how to read, and interpret figures. They agree that the out-moded china is to be found forward, and so that’s where they go-to the most beautiful part of the ship, where many ribs radiate from the up-curving keel, forming an upside-down vault, so it’s like being a fly exploring the ceiling of a cathedral. The sailors move a few crates out of the way-they never stop talking, each trying to outdo the other in bloodcurdling yarns about the cruelty of certain infamous pirates. They pull up a hatch that gives access to the bilge, and in no time at all two crates of markedly ugly china have been fetched out. The crates themselves are handsome productions of clear-grained red cedar, chosen because it won’t rot in the wet bilge. Into them the china has been thrown with no packing material between items, so part of Daniel’s work is already done. He thanks the two sailors and they look back at him queerly, then return abovedecks. Daniel spreads an old hammock-two yards of sailcloth-on the planking, tips a crate over, and then attacks its spilled contents with a maul.