Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (290 page)

In the East India Hall, where men ruffled much less and were staid, precise and melancholy, where merchandise came before war, and ciphers in account-books before deaths to be blotted out with blood, his quick eye took in that the models of ships were flatter, slower, longer, rounder below the water line, swelling out like gourds and melons or tureens for soup, with masts proportionately shorter and cordage proportionately more dense.

“Sir,” he said to his guide, “these are good ships to carry burthens; but they will ill sustain the burden of a navigator.”

His guide, who was bringing him before the merchants, said —

“Aye; but that is provided for and thought of.” These merchants were indeed employers after his own mind; they had thought to give him a fly-boat — a Dutch make of craft, very shallow of draft and yet swift in the water — one that was new and stout and had been tried upon one voyage to find that she sailed well. He had no need to doubt that, because they, in their slow way, were as eager as he to find the Passage and shorten their road to their merchanting ground. He was to have this swift fly-boat — little, yet with all her cargo space filled with provender enough for nine months, and another smaller one as consort; he was to have twenty-four men under their own captains, and might take one Englishman that understood not navigation; he was to have very new and good compasses; very good cordials and comforters; a cabin well ordered and furnished; services of silver and gold and beakers of crystal after the navigating practice of East India shipping ways. For it was considered that if they came upon savage peoples or upon great pagan emperors, it was well that these should be impressed with wonder and admiration at the way in which these sailors lived that would do trade with them. And, for his reward, the navigator should have two hundred and fifty pounds for his voyage — and, if he found the Passage, he should have the title of High Pilot to the United Provinces and a salary of two hundred pounds by the year for as long as his Passage remained secret from other country traders and one hundred pounds afterwards. This was to keep him to secrecy and silence if he found the way.

Upon these terms Hudson rubbed his hands.

“Why,” he said, “when I have seen the two ships and have taken counsel with my wife, I will tell you more. But I like your terms.”

They were, indeed, so practical, these sad and solemn and black-coated men, that they took out their maps and consulted with him then and there upon when he should sail, and they had passages marked of all voyages made before and spoke learnedly, which he liked less. For that was trespassing upon his ground — upon the secret and mystery of navigation. Nevertheless, when he had seen his little ships, and had said that he would have higher masts for swifter sailing when ice seemed like to close in, and stout fenders of bales of wool-cloth to withstand the pressure of ice, and when he had consulted with his wife as to when she would have her knitting ready, he made his agreement to sail in one month from that day — it was the 15th of February — and he took one quarter of his pay in advance, the rest being to be paid to his wife by the East India Company upon the day on which he sailed.

By the first day of March there had come to him the agents of the French King, of the Venetians and of certain Portugais, each offering him higher sums than the other. And there he stood in the large room of his inn of the Golden Horn, like a king, with his court before him and his wife beside the stove at his back, and gave them all their dismissals.

“Sirs,” he said, “this estate of navigator is the most honourable that yet hath been found. Ye offer me weighty sums in gold, yet I blow it — for the honour of my mystery and craft — as if it had been thistledown, from me. I will take mine engagement for some future year to the King of France, and for the next and the next to the city of Venice or the Portugais, according as they offer and in their order. But this year I am for this East India Company of the City of Amsterdam.”

There remained, when these foreigners had gone, seven young Englishmen. They were all strong and straight; you could not choose between them. Five had followed him from London town, his commission having been in his absence noised abroad; one had come from Venice with the Embassy to him — such was his fame and such the desirability of these adventures to the young of that day. And the seventh was Edward Colman.

CHAPTER II
.

HE had been a fortnight out of Rye now, and he had seen and considered many things. But he had two things that he most urgently considered: in the first place how he could most cheaply and most easily purchase his pardon in England, for he was not very much minded that Magdalena should come out of England — voyaging was not a thing for women — and he was not much minded to be parted from his wife and from his home for very long. At that day, when ships were very slow and roads very bad, if a man went away he might very well stay for six months or nine, but longer he -would have found irksome. So, to that end, he went to one of the several pardon-brokers of Amsterdam — a Dutchman who had dwelt for most of his life in Sandwich itself, where he had been born and where he had been bred to the law. This man, called Husum, a brisk young man of thirty, had made a great art of getting outlawed Papists pardoned at little cost. He charged a man so many pounds according to his crimes and the greatness of his estate, and, for that sum, he agreed to pay the outlaw’s fines, bribe those lords of the King’s Council that were to be bribed, and provide him with passports and a pardon signed by King James himself. When it came to such a crime as owling, he told Edward Colman very honestly he could not fix the cost nor know the nature of the fine. But he took upon him to work for Edward Colman’s pardoning in the cheapest way that he could, and, when he had ascertained the charges — which might be great or small, he did not know — to treat with him as to his own fees and to come to an honourable compact with him.

He placed the date, at which this consummation could be arrived at, at seven months; he undertook to impede with the Council of the United Provinces any applications that the English agent might make for Edward Colman’s cession as a rebel, and, in the meanwhile, he recommended that Edward Colman should make a voyage or an overland travel in various parts of the provinces, and, whilst he stayed in Amsterdam, to avoid going into the Heerengracht at night, for there the English agent had his lodgings. My lord Scroop had been known to hire bullies that threw pitch-plasters over English outlaws’ faces, and so to ship them to England secretly. Edward Colman thanked him for his advice and stored it carefully in his mind, and, because the man had the reputation of a very honest practitioner who had restored more than three hundred exiles to their native land and, therefore, was little likely to play false and lose that profitable renown, he made that compact with him and dismissed the matter from his well-ordered mind.

He went about only by daylight, for Amsterdam was at that time a port very filled with foreigners, and, though he did not think that any man then there knew of his being there, it might well be that some merchant he had done business with, some sea-captain or some sailor might recognize his face and report his presence to Lord Scroop, the English agent. And, though he was safe to walk the streets by day, it might well be that he could be stunned or stifled in some court, or even overset from his boat in some canal and so taken, at night, aboard of an English ship. So it was part of his plan to take a voyage some whither — even to the New World — after he should have had a letter from Magdalena, which should come with a ship of his, from Rye, in a fortnight. He took, in the meanwhile, a room in the Engelgracht, which is parallel and behind the Keizersgracht, and he devoted himself to the study of ship-building as it was there practised.

This had been one of his chief reasons for selecting Amsterdam as the place of his sojourn, for, though he had seen only a few Dutch ships, he had heard many reports from seamen of how swift and how fitted to carry great cargoes and make great voyages were the ships of little draft that the Hollanders built for sailing in their shallow inland seas. He went, therefore, very little along the broad, white-faced, tall and clean streets of the city. Once or twice he walked in them for his pleasure and entertainment; it amazed him, coming from Rye, which was dirty and crooked and small, to see how the streets spread out and were clean and straight, with square and pointed gables, going upwards like steps towards the heavens, with the red roofs behind. It pleased him to see Holland girls polishing the cobble-stones before their doors, giving to each stone the attention of sand-paper and cloth, because that reminded him of Magdalena. But, for the most part, he took a little boat each morning out along the side-canal, called the Canal of St. Michael, running between the tall house fronts to where, without the walls on the dunes, there were some thirty score of ships, their timbers clean and white, like skeletons of sweet-smelling wood, beneath the skies mostly, but some beneath open roofs so that the men might work even when snow fell. And here, amongst the famous fly-boats, he spent long mornings with measures and plumblines and note-books and his quick eye — long days of absorbed and tranquil work. For, in heart and before everything, he delighted in tools and workmanship, and was a shipbuilder.

And in these famous fly-boats that he could see tacking, engrossed all round him in the shallow waters, he could foresee the regeneration of his town of Rye, with its shallow waters, its sea that came up over miles of mud flats and its setting harbour. It was what he had come out to see, and he took a sensuous delight in learning each detail of keels and transoms, of spars and sails and riggings. He learned, very carefully, all these names in Low Dutch, for he was minded to take back with him a crew of Dutch workmen that should build such ships for him in his yards at home till his own men were taught and fit. His nights he spent with an old shipbuilder, who had been ruined by the Spaniards at Antwerp and wore great horn spectacles, and taught him Dutch words and measurements for pay, or with one or two Dutch youths in his inn, with whom he played draughts or disputed upon points of religion.

His letter from Magdalena taught him that she was well contented to be in his house and to be guided by his old nurse. Anne Jeal, she had heard, had gone to London, but some said she had flown away with a sorcerer; but she, Magdalena, was unmolested and treated honourably, sitting in his seat in the church, and allowed to go out before the wives of eleven other barons in her order of precedence. Her father, however, remained where he had been. And she prayed her husband to be mindful of his safety, to preserve her image in his heart, and to come back to her when there was no more danger and he had learned all that might be for his profit in foreign parts.

It was after he had had this letter, and after he had again consulted with his pardon-broker, that Edward Colman sought out Henry Hudson, the navigator.

He heard the great man’s interviews given to the French and Venetians and the Portuguese, and he considered with himself whether he should stay and make his application, for this, it appeared to him, might prove an expensive enterprise, and he could not forget that his life and fortunes were in some danger. Not a great danger, but some. And he considered that, if he died, he must leave to Magdalena all the money that he could leave there in Holland out of the clutches of the King’s wrathful Majesty and the Star Chamber Court.

Nevertheless, he did not consider that death or forfeiture were very near him, and it behoved a proper man not to take death early and unnaturally into his account, but to lay his plans for the future so that, if he died in the three-scores, he might leave to his heirs a goodly name and heritage. For this he wished to see the New World, so that he might know what merchandises he should best send thither and what he must commission his agents there to buy for him of the savages. For he imagined himself in the future, seated in his town of Rye, building his fly-boats and sending out his fleets to the New World or to other ports in the East if America seemed like to prove unprofitable.

He had kept himself a little apart from his brother Englishmen in that room; they were, all the six of them save one, younger than he and rawer; he had little taste for the converse of boys. But when the foreigners were gone he came perforce into the little, curved line of seven, over which the navigator ran his twinkling eyes.

“Ho!” he said, and ran his fingers caressingly in his thick square beard, “here be seven adventurers. Dame, whom will ye best trust to mend my cloaks?”

He took, however, no heed to his wife’s protest that it was not for her to speak; but, with his back still to her and the stove, shot out quickly the query —

“Who among you hath studied the art and mystery of navigation?”

There stood out from among them the one of them that was least young — a man maybe of forty, but thin and weatherbeaten, with a tight-skinned nose and hollowish temples.

“My name is Pember Trewinnoth,” he said, and his voice was a little hollow.

“Sirrah,” Hudson said, “I know that name. You sailed with Devlin to the New Found Land.”

“I have sailed to many places,” the lean man said; his black cloak was a little threadbare, his’ stockings had a hole in them.

“You are a man very useful at a pinch?” Hudson asked. “You know the sails and the ropes? If I fell ill you could mark down the reckonings for me? you have the Dutch language which I have not, and could converse with the crew? You have a little coin and would adventure it — it being your last — upon such a voyage as this?”

“All this I can and will,” Pember Trewinnoth said a shade eagerly, and with a light in his deep-set eyes. “I learned the mystery of navigation of Plymouth pilots.”

“Why, you would be a very proper man,” Hudson said. “If I should die you could step into my shoes.”

“I think,” a fair, heavy boy whispered in Edward Colman’s ear, “that this man will be chosen. We had best go about our affairs.”

“I am minded to wait,” Colman answered. “Why,” the navigator said to Trewinnoth, “you are a very proper man; you may get you gone.” Trewinnoth flushed hideously, and muttered in his throat —

“For why, Henry Hudson?”

“You know too much, Pember Trewinnoth, and have too little coin. I am contracted to the East Indiamen to take no man with me that knoweth the mystery of our craft. They will not that what I discover for them should go forth to the world.”

“Pray you—” Trewinnoth flustered.

“Pray you,” Hudson cried him down; “you and I should never agree; I like not your complexion. You are of the kidney of such men as Mr. Doughty that was hanged for his disagreements in Magellan’s Land by Sir Francis Drake. I know too much of mutinies on the seas: dried meat breedeth mutineers. I will have none with me that can step into my shoes. It shall be life and death to this vessel that I alone can bring it back. I have done, get you gone.”

Trewinnoth did not get him gone, but he sat down behind a pillar, at a drinking-table and called for a filled pipe and muscadel wine to drink. Hudson laughed.

“Now, bully boys,” he said, “who of you hath money to cast upon this adventure? Some of you would be sending merchandise or bringing it along; who be they? Where’s Balthasar Harse that writ to me?”

The fair, heavy boy that had whispered to Colman stepped forward and blushed.

“Why, get you gone, Balthasar Harse,” Hudson cried out; “there is no profit to be won in this adventure, but only the profit of honour, adventure and some learning.”

The boy hung his head and turned upon his heel.

Hudson surveyed the five that still stood before him.

“Now,” he said, “I will ask you, how many of you have
£300
to adventure upon the chance of this voyage?”

The four others stood still to signify that they all had it: but Edward Colman moved a little apart.

“Sir,” he said, “I will first discover if the voyage is such a one as shall profit me.”

Hudson gave him a quick glance beneath his brows.

“Gentleman adventurer,” he said, “as to that you shall satisfy yourself hereafter. Now I am about discovering if you be such a man as shall profit me.”

“That is in reason,” Edward Colman answered. Hudson looked at him more carefully, from his face to his shoes and then returned his glance to the other four.

“Now I will ask,” he said, “how many of you do not speak this Holland tongue;” and three of them were sent away because they had no Dutch.

There remained then Edward Colman and a young man of Bideford called Lang; to these two Hudson addressed his words —

“Ye two have each three hundred pounds, ye have each no knowledge of the mystery of navigation; you seek, neither of you, any profit of merchandise; ye have each a passable knowledge of this language here. Let me now test you in this last particular and I have done. The one of you who shall best satisfy me may then ask his questions.”