1636: Seas of Fortune (39 page)

“But what about drinking water? Surely you didn’t have enough water for so long a voyage.”

“At first I just rationed our water. But after it was clear that we would be drifting a long time, I realized that I had to somehow take the salt out of seawater. I poured it into a big cooking pot, brought it to a boil, and put a wooden rice tub on top of the pot.”

“On top? What good would that do?”

“So sorry, I am poor at explaining this. I made a hole in the bottom of the rice tub and ran a pipe through it. The steam from the pot went up the pipe and turned back to water inside the tub.”

Tokubei thought about this.

“You made a
ranbiki
! A still!”

“If you say so.”

“In the Ryukyus, they use a still to make a strong drink, what the Southern Barbarians call brandy.” The Ryukyu islands, south of Nippon, were under the secret control of the Shimazu clan of Satsuma. Secret, so that the Chinese would continue to come there to trade.

“I have never been to the Ryukyus.”

“Well, it was clever of you to think of such a thing. How much drinking water could you make?”

“Perhaps twelve quarts a day.”

Haruno took over the questioning. “I’ll have to remember that trick. How long were you adrift?”

“Fourteen moons.”

“And you were carried into that bay, where the wreck is now?”

“Yes. Only half of my sailors were still alive. Barely. The Kwakwaka’wakw took us in, and fed us, but they made us their slaves. Three of my sailors were sold to other Indian tribes, up or down the coast. One to the
Haida
of the north, a second to the Nuu-chah-nulth of the south, the third, I know not.

“My boys are sixteen and twenty-five now. My wife returned to the Wheel a few years ago.

“The ‘Kwakwaka’wakw’ are a nation?”

“No, it just means, ‘those who speak
Kwak’wala
.’ The local natives are the Nakomgilisa. And there are several other Kwakwaka’wakw groups.”

“All the cargo is gone. Why didn’t the Kwakwaka’wakw take the ship timbers?”

“They were going to, but when the salvage party walked on the beach, a great wave came up and knocked them over. They decided that it was a sign that Kumugwe, their sea god, wanted it left alone.”

Tokubei raised his hand. “I will need to give your bay a name, for my report to my superiors. May I name it after you?”

“That would be far too great an honor. And it would slight my fellow castaways. Call it, Hyoryumin Bay.” In Japanese,
hyoryu
was the action of drifting after a shipwreck, and the unfortunate mariners were
hyoryumin
.

* * *

Heishiro took a puff on the pipe he had been offered. “So, what brings Nihonjin, even samurai, in a Southern Barbarian ship to the Land Across the Sea?” He handed the pipe to Tokubei.

Tokubei took a pull and then answered, “We have reason to believe that there are valuable ores on this island.”

“What sort of ores?”

“Iron. Copper. Gold.”

“The Indians have no iron tools or weapons, and I have no idea what iron ore looks like. I have seen copper ornaments here. Besides the coppers they took from us, that is. I don’t know whether the copper is mined on this island, or elsewhere. But it’s a big, big island. As for gold, well, the Nakomgilisala
are not the richest of the Kwakwaka’wakw. So it could be here without my knowing anything about it.”

* * *

The
Ieyasu Maru
continued down the west coast to Quatsino Sound, and met the local Indians. These were of different Kwakwaka’wakw groups, the Quatsino and Klaskino, but the dialect of Kwakwala they spoke was similar enough to that of the Nakomgilisala so that Heishiro and his comrades were able to make themselves understood.

These Indians were friendly, and anxious to trade. Well, to be honest, the Nakomgilisala had greeted the
Ieyasu Maru
; it was unfortunate that Haruno and Yokubei couldn’t let the enslavement of Nihonjin
go unpunished. The Japanese, too, had honor to preserve.

Among the Quatsino and the Klaskino, Tokubei bought supplies, local products that he thought might find a market in Japan . . . and Indian slaves. The last purchase he made with reluctance, since the Japanese frowned on the practice of slavery by the Portuguese, Dutch and similar barbarians, but it was a regrettable necessity. They needed translators who could speak both Kwakwala and the languages of the Indians to the south. Once the
Ieyasu Maru
was under way, he could promote them from slave to retainer.

Unfortunately, the Quatsino and Klaskino claimed to know nothing of any iron, copper or gold deposits in the area. If they existed, Tokubei was told, they were deep in Hoyalas territory, and the Hoyalas were presently at war with the Klaskino. It would not be prudent to proceed further.

Assuming the Indians were telling the truth, of course.

July 1634,

Pacific Ocean

Jacob de Veer, first mate of the Dutch ship
Blauwe Draeck,
had his ear to the wall that separated the
kirishitan
quarters from the rest of the ship’s hold. One of the sailors from the watch below had anxiously summoned him, reporting a “commotion” forward.

De Veer had first rushed to the similar barrier that lay above deck, to make sure that the
kirishitan
were not already seeking to take over the ship. The deck lay deserted in the moonlight, seemingly belying his concerns. Nonetheless, he had doubled the wall guards.

Then he had gone back down to the hold, hoping that his ears could find a clue that his eyes could not. It was clear from the outset that the
kirishitan
weren’t attempting to break through the lower wall; what the sailor had heard was the sound of many voices, not that of axes or other tools.

De Veer had been to Hirado often enough to learn a smattering of Japanese. He could only make out a few words, but those were enough to cause him to flinch: “dead . . . dead or dying . . .” And once he thought he heard a woman say, “. . . the poor little ones . . .”

The sailor was close beside him, so close that de Veer could feel the heat of his breath. “What are they saying, sir? Should the captain be called?”

De Veer carefully composed his expression. Blandly, he assured the sailor, “nothing for you to worry about. Go back to your duties.”

Once the sailor was out of sight, de Veer made his way to the captain’s cabin by a different route. As he walked, his mind was in turmoil. Had some dread disease taken hold among the
kirishitan
? If so, it had acted suddenly; they had seemed healthy on his last watch.

Would it just as suddenly inflict itself upon the Dutch?

De Veer couldn’t help but wish that he could somehow cut loose the forward third of the ship, and leave the Japanese to their fate.

After a walk that seemed to take hours, but surely was just a few minutes, he knocked on the captain’s door. Rap. Rap.

He heard the muffled voice of the captain. “Whoever’s bothering me better have a damn good reason, or I’ll give him cause to regret it.”

“De Veer, sir. And it’s important.”

“Enter, damn your eyes.”

De Veer made his report as matter-of-factly as he could.

“I wonder if it’s the smallpox,” said Captain Campen. “It’s always hardest on the young. And I heard that some Chinese doctor blew old pox dust into our colonists’ noses, so they would get a weak form of the disease. Maybe it didn’t work as it was supposed to.”

“I’ve had the pox, sir.” De Veer’s pockmarked face confirmed the truth of this declaration. “So has the ship’s surgeon. We can go forward and check out the situation.”

“Not tonight, you won’t. You’ll need to wait until daylight, so we can see that it’s safe for you to do so. Perhaps they have the flux, or the ague, or something else that you
could
succumb to. Perhaps they’re just faking illness. Get some sleep now. At daybreak, you can go forward, call for just one of the Japanese to come above to speak.”

De Veer went below and crawled into his hammock. The hammock swung back and forth, and the sea seemed to murmur with each upswing: “Dead . . . Dying . . . Dead . . . Dying . . .”

The next day, de Veer summoned the surgeon and the two of them were assisted over the barrier. Both were weaponless; a pistol or cutlass would hardly allow them to escape a hundred Japanese, and there was no sense in delivering weapons into the hands of potential mutineers.

De Veer went to the forward hatch, knocked, and shouted in Portuguese, “Send up one man to speak with us. One only, or we’ll shoot!” He and the surgeon then backed away a bit, to give the wall guards a clear line of fire.

One of the
kirishitan
emerged. “What is the problem? Why can’t we all come on deck for our morning exercise?”

“You’re not all sick?” said de Veer. “With the pox, perhaps?” He said this quietly; he didn’t want the wall guards to hear him. “I have brought our physician.” That was something of an exaggeration, since the ship’s surgeon was hardly that.

“Sick? No more and no worse than you’d expect, in a group this large, cooped up in a ship for so long. And no cases of pox, thank Deusu. Why would you think otherwise?” He made a Shinto gesture of aversion against evil, without any apparent awareness of his theological faux pas.

De Veer explained what he had heard. The Japanese man looked puzzled for a moment. And then he started to laugh.

* * *

“Well?” asked Captain Campen.

“He said that they didn’t need a physician,” said de Veer, his tone one of profound disgust. “But that if would be a kindness to summon one of the Great Lord’s master gardeners.”

“What?”

De Veer explained that according to his informant, the “poor little ones” that were “dead” or “dying” were silkworms. The word for silkworm—
kaiko
—also meant child raising. The women of many Japanese villages cultivated silkworms as a sideline, and indeed spoke to them as if they were little children.

The villagers on board the
Blauwe Draeck
had brought silkworm eggs, and freshly collected mulberry leaves. After five weeks or so, the silkworms had spun their cocoons. The best of these were reserved for breeding, and the others were thrown into hot water to kill the insect, and then spun into thread.

The problem had come with the eggs of the second generation. They hatched, but the remaining mulberry leaves were now old, and the tiny jaws of the new larvae weren’t equal to the task of chewing them. So most had died.

The captain, all a smile, asked de Veer if he thought that the Japanese would be comforted if the captain conducted a memorial service for the departed. De Veer rolled his eyes. “May I return to my duties, sir?”

The captain waved him off, and de Veer fled, the captain’s laughter ringing in his ears, already red and burning hot with embarrassment.

Coast of Vancouver Island

The
Ieyasu Maru
’s next destination was Nootka Sound. While the atlas said nothing about any mineral deposits there, the copied atlas showed it to be home to an up-time town with a most intriguing name: Gold River.

By rounding Vancouver Island on the ocean side, the Japanese had avoided the narrow channels and tide rips of the Inside Passage, but guaranteed themselves ample exposure to the caprices of Susanoo. The wind, normally blowing from the northwest, backed around the compass until it was from the southeast, and increased to gale force, blocking the
Ieyasu Maru
’s sojourn down the coast.

It was only through skilled seamanship that the
Ieyasu Maru
avoided becoming the second Japanese shipwreck on Vancouver Island. By the time the storm abated, and the wind returned to the northwest, the
Ieyasu Maru
was well south of Nootka Sound. Indeed, they were at about the latitude of the Straits of Juan de Fuca, which separated Vancouver Island from the up-time state of Washington.

Captain Haruno summoned Tokubei. “I think we have to give up on Gold River for this year.”

Tokubei winced. “Our patrons will be disappointed.”

“You saw how it was on our approach to Vancouver Island. We had winds from the northwest, day after day, for at least a hundred
ri
. So we’d have to sail way offshore, then work our way north and east, as the winds permitted. It could take weeks. Is it really worth it? Our rescued countrymen say that the weather will take a turn for worse once summer’s over. So going to Gold River might mean losing our chance at Texada.”

“Well . . .” Tokubei shifted his weight as the ship reacted to a larger wave than usual. “Texada is important. Both the atlas and the encyclopedia say it has iron. And we have nothing definitive indicating that there is actually gold at Gold River.”

“Might be a poetic fancy, neh? So named because of the silt in the river gives it a yellow color. Like the Hwang Ho, the Yellow River, in China.”

“Yes. Or when the first European explorer saw it, it was gleaming in the sunlight.”

“All right, then. We’ll set course for Texada.”

August 1634,

On the
Date Maru

“Munesane.”

The young samurai bowed. “Father.”

Date Masamune gestured for him to take a cup of tea from a nearby tray. “Your tutors have been pleased with your progress. However, it is time to step up your education with regard to matters of statecraft, as it is surely only a few years before you must succeed me as the Lord of New Nippon.”

“May the
buddhas and kamis grant you a long life!”

“They already have done so. I am sixty-nine years old, nearing autumn’s close. Back home, as my sixth son, you would not have had much chance of being given the opportunity to rule a
han
. Here, you do. . . . The question is whether you can hold it.

The old warlord inhaled the steam coming from his own cup, then took a sip. “Ah, we must enjoy this while our supply lasts. I wonder if tea can be grown in New Nippon? Well, back to my line of inquiry—what threats must you overcome?”

Munesane thought about this. “Most immediately, the
kirishitan
. They might seek to overthrow the Date family and choose a Christian ruler. The king of Spain, even.”