The Confusion

At that moment the character of the voyage changed. Three hundred miles separated them from the point of Mariveles at the entrance to Manila Bay, and it would all be coastal sailing, which meant contending with weak and fickle winds, and taking frequent soundings, and dropping anchor at night lest they run aground on some unseeable hazard in the dark. Some days they made no progress whatever, owing to contrary winds—by day, they traded with locals for fresh fruit and meat brought out in long dual-outrigger boats, and by night they patrolled Minerva‘s decks with loaded blunderbusses, waiting for those same locals to steal out in the same boats and creep over the gunwales with knives in their teeth.

 

At any rate, ten days of this sort of travel brought them, late one afternoon, to the point of Mariveles, where several rocks projected from the surf like daggers. The garrison on the nearby island of Corregidor caught sight of Minerva around sunset and lit some fires to prevent her from running aground. By triangulating against these they were able to bring the ship gingerly around the south side of the island and drop anchor in the bay there. The next morning the Spanish ensign in command of the garrison came out on a longboat for an hour’s visit; they knew him thoroughly, as Minerva had passed this way a dozen or so times on her triangular voyages among Manila, Macao, and Queena-Kootah. He gave them the latest jokes and gossip from Manila and they gave him some packets of spices and a few trinkets they’d picked up in Japan.

 

They weighed anchor and sailed across Manila Bay. The Spanish castle on the point of Cavite came into view first, and later they could make out, beyond it, the bell-towers and fortifications of Manila, and a thicket of masts and spars, shot through with furling silk banners, around the outlet of the Pasig River. It was the expectation of most aboard that they would make direct for there. But as they weathered the point of Cavite and entered into calmer water in the lee of the castle, van Hoek ordered most of the sails taken in. A banca—a sort of longboat hewn from the trunk of a single colossal tree—came toward them, and as it drew closer, Jack was able to recognize Moseh and Surendranath, who had stayed behind to settle some business affairs, and Jimmy and Danny, who had been acting as their bodyguards. One by one these men clambered up the pilot’s ladder and joined their brethren on the upperdeck. Moseh and Surendranath went back into van Hoek’s wardroom to confer with the captain and the other chief men of the enterprise. Jack could have participated in this meeting but declined to because he could tell from the look on Moseh’s face that it had all gone more or less well, and that their next voyage would be eastbound.

 

This was the innermost harbor of Manila Bay: a hammock-shaped anchorage slung between two points of land several miles apart, each of which had been built up into a fortress by the Spaniards, or rather by their Tagalian minions, during the century and a half that they had held sway over these islands. The closer of the two forts, just off their starboard, was Cavite: a conventional square, four-bastioned castle thrust out into the water on a slender neck of land, so that the bay served as its moat. A ditch had been dug across that neck so that the landward approach could be controlled by a drawbridge. This ditch was situated at some distance from the castle proper, and the intervening space had been covered with buildings: a crowd of cane houses with more substantial wood-frame dwellings rising out of it from place to place, and three stone churches that had been erected, or were being erected, by various Popish religious orders.

 

The opposite end of the harbor was the city of Manila proper. The Spaniards had taken a small peninsula framed on one side by the Bay and on two others by rivers: the Pasig, and a welter of pissant tributaries that joined the Pasig just short of where it emptied into the Bay. They had enclosed this peninsula in a modern sort of slope-sided wall, a couple of miles in circuit, and erected noble bulwarks and demilunes at its corners, rendering it impregnable to land assault by Dutch, Chinese, or native legions. The outlet of the Pasig was dominated by a considerable fortress whose guns commanded the river, the Bay, and certain troublesome ethnic barangays across the river.

 

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