The System of the World (84 page)

MORNING OF THURSDAY,
29
JULY
1714

H
ANOVER WAS LANDLOCKED.
Its greatest body of water was a three-mile-wide puddle. The rich might invest in, the rash might sail on, proper ships; but they had to travel abroad to Bremerhaven first. For most Hanoverians, the preferred way of getting to the other side of a body of water was to wait for it to freeze, then sprint across.
Sophia,
the sloop that Caroline and Johann had boarded in the dead of night off the Isle of Dogs, was technically a Hanoverian vessel, in that she carried impressive-looking documents asserting that she was. But the crew consisted mostly of boys from Friesland, the skipper was an Antwerp Protestant named Ursel, and the lads who had muscled the oars of the longboat last night had been hired, along with the boat, from a Danish whaler that was having her hull scraped in Rotherhithe. Those Danes were now waking up with sore backs in East London. Much water, some fresh and some brackish, had passed beneath
Sophia
’s keel in the meantime.

Left to form her own opinions, Caroline might have judged that they were now out in the sea, and well on their way to Antwerp. The fog made it impossible to see more than a stone’s throw in any direction, but
Sophia
was being shouldered from one brawny roller to the next like a child being passed around by a crowd at a hanging. The temperature had dropped (which, as the Natural Philosopher in her knew, must account for the fog), and the air smelled different. But that this was pure landlubberly foolishness could be known by watching Ursel, who was no happier, here and now, than a Hanoverian, half-way across the Steinhuder Meer, when the ice he is treading on begins to crack and tilt. “
This
is why no one does this,” he said to Johann, in a pidgin halfway between Dutch and German.

The second
this,
taken in the context of all that had happened in the last several hours, probably meant “to sneak out of the Pool in the middle of the night so that the Customs officials at Gravesend shall not board the vessel, inspect her cargo, and receive their customary
gratuity, and then to run down the Hope, navigating by sounding-lead, in hopes of squirting past the fort at Sheerness before dawn so as not to be blown out of the water by the coastal artillery situated there for that purpose or overhauled by naval vessels sent out to run down smugglers.” All of which looked to have been accomplished, to landlubberly eyes. A huge bell had bonged nine times, not long ago, and one of the mates, who knew the Thames, had identified it as the Cathedral in Canterbury. To Caroline, who had studied maps, this suggested they were well clear of the river’s channel.

It was less clear what Ursel had meant by the first
this
. It was something so bad as to render self-evident the folly of having attempted the second
this
. Caroline looked at Johann. He was even more exhausted than she (for Caroline had slept and he had not), and more sea-sick to boot. It was clear from the look on his face that he did not know anything more than she did about the nature of the first
this
. And so Caroline stopped looking to him for answers, and watched the Frieslanders. They were very busy with sounding-leads, on port
and
starboard; one would think, to watch them, that
Sophia
was under assault by swimming pirates with daggers clenched in their teeth, and her only weapons were these slugs of lead on the ends of ropes. She had seen this procedure done before. Usually it took a good deal longer, as the lead took some time to strike bottom, and the rope had to be drawn back up one double arm-length, or fathom, at a time.
These
chaps were tossing their leads several times a minute, and calling out fathom-soundings without even bothering to draw in the lines. The numbers sounded funny in the dialect of Friesland; but they were small numbers.

She worked her way round the poop-deck rail toward Johann. “They all began to get terribly excited when the cock crowed.”

“I heard no cock crow,” answered Johann.

“Because you were crowing at the same moment.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Vomiting,” she explained. “But a cock did crow, distinctly, over there.” She waved vaguely to starboard.

Johann managed a confident smile. “Do not worry. Sounds carry strangely in fog. It could have been miles away. Or perhaps it was aboard another ship.”

A cow mooed.

“The cock-crow could have a second meaning as well,” Caroline pointed out, “no less troubling than the first: namely, that the fog is lifting.” She had to raise her voice and lean closer to Johann, because Ursel had begun screaming. Like expert flautists, who could use the trick of circular breathing to play long continuous notes, Ursel had
the ability, oft seen among sergeants, schoolteachers, wives, and other leaders of men, to scream for several minutes without letting up to replenish his lungs. “He has had an epiphany,” Caroline said. “For quite a while, we wandered lost in the fog. Now, suddenly, he knows where we are.”

“Yes,” said Johann, “the wrong place.” Which was so obvious that it was bad form for him to have mentioned it. For the issue of all Ursel’s shouting, and the exertions of the sailors, was that
Sophia
came about, and, after a pause to carve her initials in the mushy bottom-sand with her keel, began to make head-way along a new course. In a few minutes’ time, the soundings began to aspire past five, nay, even six fathoms. Of livestock the calls became less distinct, and the smell was replaced by that of creatures with fins and shells. The sky brightened from gray, to silver, to gold, and Caroline began to sense its warmth, faintly, on her lips, as she sensed Johann’s body heat on cold nights in her bedchamber. Finally they emerged from the fog altogether. A shadowy blot off their port beam resolved itself into a Royal Navy brig parallelling them, and going about the task of opening up her gunports.

“At other moments during the execution of the present Plan I have had occasion to question whether it had been well-wrought; and yet troubles resolved, and we got
this
far,” Johann said. “I shall pray to God and trust in Providence that this is not as bad as it would plainly seem on its face.”
His
face was red: in some circumstances, adorable, here not a good sign.

“Poor Jean-Jacques. As out of place here as a rooster.”

“If we could have
galloped
to Hanover, I would have so arranged it,” he admitted. “But it is not for
you
to show concern for
me
in this pass.”

“If we are overhauled, I shall put on the black sash that says I am in this country
incognito,
” Caroline said. “
Somewhere
on yonder brig must be an officer, a man of breeding, who shall know what it means.”

“The
incognito
worked for Sophie when she would go to visit Liselotte in the halcyon days of Versailles,” Johann brooded, “but to expect Tories and Whigs to observe such a quaint conceit, in present circumstances, is like asking two gamecocks to toast the Queen’s health before they commence slashing. No, I think I shall have to take responsibility, if it comes to that.”

“What does
that
mean? You shall claim that you kidnapped me and brought me to London against my will?”

“Something like that.”

“It is foolish. I will simply deny that I am who I am.”

The discussion went on thus, tediously, circularly, and without result, even as the skipper Ursel was carrying on a parallel exchange with the captain of the Royal Navy brig. By signal-flags, the brig ordered
Sophia
to allow herself to be overhauled.
Sophia
affected not to see, then, not to understand, the message; the brig stiffened it with a cannon-shot across
Sophia
’s bow.
Sophia,
which by now had maneuvered into broader and deeper waters off Foulness Sand, raised sail, and began to make run for it by sailing closer to the wind than the square-rigged brig was capable of. This got them several miles nearer the open sea, for the wind was generally out of the east, which was the direction they wanted to go. They zigzagged, sometimes sailing a few points north, sometimes a few points south, of due east. The brig did likewise, but had to take wider and more pronounced zigzags, which ought to have made it slower. So it looked favorable for
Sophia,
at least by this simple account. But as the morning wore on, it became evident to Caroline (who was observing closely, as she looked forward to inheriting a Navy) that this was very much a devil-in-the-details sort of matter. The brig was capable of moving through the water faster than
Sophia,
so the difference in net speed was not quite as great as all that. And the brig had a proper pilot aboard, who knew where the shifting sands at the mouth of the river were
today
. Whereas Ursel had to work from a chart that had been printed ten years ago and was now a palimpsest of confusing hand-drawn cross-hatchings, and angry and emphatic notes in diverse Northern European languages. On account of which
Sophia
’s actual course, far from being the stately zigzag she would have traced across deep blue water, was a jangled fibrillation about due east, careering to one side or another whenever Ursel phant’sied they were approaching some peril rumored on the chart, or when the trend of the soundings was inauspicious, or the color of the water or the texture of its surface did not please him. Much time was spent, and much of
Sophia
’s forward momentum pissed away, in frequent course-changes, even as the brig loped easily back and forth across the estuary, plotting each tack to pierce invisible gaps between the Middle, the Warp, the Mouse, the Spile, the Spaniard, the Shivering Sand, and other Hazards to Navigation too small or too ephemeral to waste names on. It was altogether tense, chancy, and perilous, and so ought to have been thrilling. Yet it stretched out over half the day, and as much as an hour would sometimes go by without anything in particular happening. It was a bit like sitting by the bedside of a loved one with a grave illness: momentous, all-consuming, yet boring, hence exhausting.

In the end exhaustion caught up with Ursel. Or perhaps he had simply been outmaneuvered by the brig, which late in the morning
began to draw within firing range of
Sophia,
and seemed as if she might be trying to get into position to fire a broadside. Forced suddenly to choose between cannon-fire and shallow water, Ursel chose the latter, and promptly ran
Sophia
aground on a ridge of ooze that in retrospect was implied by a squiggle on the chart. They were between Foreness and Foulness, in a place where the way was above twenty miles wide, and a river only in name; the entire eastern half of the horizon consisted of ocean, a full one hundred and eighty degrees of mockery to the poor skipper. When Caroline asked Ursel what they ought to do next, Ursel informed her that he was not competent to offer an opinion, for he was a skipper of ships, and
Sophia
was no longer that, but a wrack, owned not by Hanover but by whomever first happened along to salvage it. Then he retreated to his cabin to drink gin.

“Well, I know nothing of Admiralty law,” said Caroline, “but this looks more ocean than river to me. I say we are on the high seas, minding our own business.”

“We are
aground,
” Johann insisted.

“Then we
were
on the high seas minding our own business,” Caroline said, “when along came that nasty brig and forced us to run aground. It is an act of piracy.”

Johann rolled his eyes.

“We were on a pleasure cruise out of Antwerp when it happened,” Caroline went on.

“What, and just happened to cross the North Sea by accident?”

“Blown off course in the night by that unusual easterly wind. Happens all the time. Come, don’t be difficult! Last night in London you said I must do deeds beyond your scope. Re-writing history is a royal prerogative, is it not?”

“So ’twould seem, if you read much history.”

“Who do you phant’sy is the more inventive writer: Queen Anne, or the woman before you?”

“
That
laurel goes to
you,
my love.”

“Very well. In a trunk belowdecks is a Hanoverian flag. Run it up the mast. Let us show our colors, that all ships passing by may plainly see what rank piracy is committed this day by the Royal Navy!” And she struck a royal enough pose in the bows, gesturing with an arm to the waters spread out before them, which were flecked with sails of great ships.

“If it pleases your royal highness,” Johann said.

“It does. Hop to it.”

In response to
Sophia
’s having run aground, the brig had to conduct certain maneuvers that occupied close to half an hour: viz.
breaking off her tack, coming about, reducing sail, and making slow head-way to a point in deeper water some half a mile distant where she could tarry long enough to deploy a longboat without having to worry that wind, current, or tide would drive her aground. By the time all of these things had been achieved,
Sophia
had run a large set of Hanoverian colors to the top of her otherwise bare mast. And this seemed to give the brig’s skipper second thoughts. For the arms of the House of Hanover were so close to those of the royal family of Great Britain as to be indistinguishable from this distance. The brig might be menacing
Sophia
with open gunports and run-out cannons; but Princess Caroline had just pressed a loaded pistol to the forehead of the brig’s skipper.

Last night, perhaps, some messenger, despatched from London by Bolingbroke, had galloped into the fort at Sheerness and presented this captain with an order to scour the estuary for such-and-such a sloop, and to capture the foreign spies aboard it. Which might have sounded straightforward enough at the time. Bolingbroke’s seal dangling from the document, the exhausted post-horse blowing outside, the spattered and red-eyed messenger, the urgent missive in the dead of night: just the sort of thing ambitious naval officers prayed for. He had done his duty well this morning. But now something had gone awry: he had been presented with an opportunity to think. The royal arms rippling from the mast-head of the grounded sloop gave him much to think
about,
and much incentive to think carefully.