The Confusion

For his part van Hoek, once he had sloshed ashore, stomped past the cannons without breaking stride, and did not even pause to light his pipe until he had encountered his three masts lying side-by-side in the middle of the town, out back of the Temple of Kali. He walked up and down the length of each one, stooping to inspect how they had been blocked up off the ground. He stood at their narrow ends and peered down them to check for undue curvature, and ambled up and down pounding on them with a pistol-butt and listening to the wood’s reverberations with a hand cupped to his ear. He frowned at cracks, as if he could weld these imperfections shut with his furious gaze, and rested his hand contemplatively on places that had been scarred by the sawing friction of hawsers, collisions with spars, and impacts of pistol-balls. At first van Hoek seemed in the grip of something that approached panic, such was his anxiety that the masts would be found wanting. Gradually this eased into the quotidian fretting and continual state of low-level annoyance that Jack knew to be the perpetual lot of all competent sea-captains.

 

Then the Dutchman stopped for a while to gaze at the butt of the mainmast. Nowhere was it more obvious than from this standpoint that what they were really looking at, here, was a stupendous tree-trunk, most likely from a virgin forest in America. In other places its nature was somewhat concealed by the carpenters’ work, and by bands of iron that had been hammered out in some enormous forge somewhere and, while still red-hot, slipped onto it like rings onto a finger so that as they cooled and shrank they would cut into the wood and become one with it. But here at the foot of the mainmast—which was almost as thick as van Hoek was tall—the tree’s growth rings, and the boundary between heartwood and sapwood, were obvious even through diverse layers of tar, caulk, and paint. Van Hoek had gazed upon it twice as he circled round the mast, and seen nothing untoward, But on this third circuit he came in closer and began to hammer at the wood with the pistol-butt. Jack heard a solid thunk, thunk and then a sharp whack; a moment’s silence; and then a cry from the Dutchman.

 

“What’s amiss? Smash your finger?” Jack inquired. Meanwhile Jan Vroom came loping out of the trees, looking a bit peaked, asking in Dutch if van Hoek had discovered rot in the mast’s heart.

 

Van Hoek was gazing incredulously at a flake of yellow metal embedded in the foot of the mainmast.

 

Now it was a longstanding tradition that whenever mariners stepped a mast they slipped a coin beneath it. Supposedly this was to placate sea-gods, or buy them passage to the afterlife when the ship went down to David Jones’s Locker and took them with it. Normally such a coin became embedded in the bottom of the mast and could be viewed the next time it was pulled out. Masts that had been stepped several times had as many coins stuck to their bottoms. This particular mast had three of them, but they had been painted over, and so were visible only as blurred scabs. Van Hoek had just knocked a disk of paint clean off one of them with a blow of his pistol-butt. It was a French louis d’or. And that was how it came about that Jack Shaftoe, Otto van Hoek, Jan Vroom, and an ever-growing crowd of curious Nayar children found themselves staring into the face of King Louis XIV of France, stamped in fine gold, out behind the Temple of Kali in Malabar.

 

“Really the coiner was a flattering knave,” Jack said. “In person he is not half so handsome as all that.”

 

Van Hoek let go his pistol, yanked a dagger from his belt, and assaulted the mast. Jack guessed he was trying to get the point of the weapon beneath the coin and worry it loose; but the way he was flailing and jabbering he was unlikely to succeed. Anyway Vroom, who was two heads taller, grabbed van Hoek’s arm on the backswing and stopped it. “It is bad luck! Leave the coin be!” Jack understood that much Dutch, anyway. He did not understand what van Hoek said in return—some sort of advanced calculus of luck, he gathered, in which the sacrilege of removing the coin was weighed against the ill omen of having a golden effigy of Leroy eternally planted in the heart of the ship.

 

Jack looked carefully left, right, and behind, in case cobras or crocodiles were creeping up on them, which in these parts was a routine precaution to take before fastening one’s attention on any particular thing for more than a few moments. Then he stepped round this dangerous pair of struggling Dutchmen, drew out his own pistol, and struck one of the other coins. Paint fell away to reveal William of Orange on an English guinea. A blow to the last remaining coin produced King Carlos II on a Spanish doubloon.

 

“For God’s sake, hasn’t he died yet!?” Jack exclaimed. “Twenty years ago people were expecting him to drown in his own spit at the next moment.”

 

Van Hoek calmed down and Vroom relaxed, but did not let go of his arms.

 

“As I read the signs, the Spanish made this mast in America for a treasure-galleon. English privateers then took it as a prize, or perhaps salvaged its wreck after some hurricanoe. Later those poor Englishmen ran afoul of the French Navy—courtesy of my old friend the duc d’Arcachon.” Jack pointed with his pistol-barrel to each of the coins in turn as he made this all up. “That French ship later came east, escorting some merchant-vessels of the Compagnie des Indes, where God only knows what befell it. At any rate, the Wheel has now turned again—you may consult our new Pilot, Father Gabriel Goto, for more concerning the Wheel—and the mast is now ours. So let’s put a fucking rupee underneath it and be on our way, shall we?”

 

“Still I do not like it,” said van Hoek, and fired a broadside of spit at the golden Louis. He aimed high, but the tobacco-brown loogie rolled down over the coin like a cloud of battle-smoke darkening the face of the sun.

 

Stephenson, Neal's books