“No, it is the exchange. Half the commer?ants of Christendom are gathered there in their French fashions. Last year these men shipped goods to America—now, they have gathered to collect their profits.”
“I see her,” said Jeronimo, with a frosty calm in his voice that Jack found moderately alarming. “She is hidden behind a galleon, but I see the Viceroy’s colors flying from her mast.”
“The brig!?” said several of the Ten.
“The brig,” said Jeronimo. “Providence—which buggered us all for so many years—has brought us here in time.”
“So the thunder that rolled across the Gulf last night was not a storm, but the guns of Cadiz saluting the galleons,” Moseh said. “Let us drink fresh water, and take a siesta, and then make for Bonanza.”
“It would be useful if we could send someone into the city now, and let him loiter around the House of the Golden Mercury for a while,” van Hoek said. Which to Jack would have meant no more than the singing of birds, except that the name jogged a memory.
“There is a house in Leipzig of the same name—it is owned by the Hacklhebers.”
Van Hoek said, “As salmon converge from all the wide ocean toward the mouths of swift rivers, Hacklhebers go wherever large amounts of gold and silver are in flux.”
“Why should we care about their doings in Cadiz?”
“Because they are sure to care about ours,” van Hoek said.
“Be that as it may, there’s not a single man, free or slave, aboard this galleot who could get through the city-gate. So this discussion is idle,” said Moseh.
“You think it will be any different at Sanlúcar de Barrameda?” van Hoek scoffed.
“Oh, I can get us into that town, Cap’n,” Jack said.
AFTER THE HEAT of midday had broken, they rowed north, keeping the salt-pans to starboard. Their ship was a galleot or half-galley, driven by two lateen sails (which were of little use today, as the wind was feeble and inconstant) and sixteen pairs of oars. Each of the thirty-two oars was pulled by two men, so the full complement of rowers was sixty-four. Like everything else about the Plan, this was a choice carefully made. A giant war-galley of Barbary, with two dozen oar-banks, and five or six slaves on each oar, and a hundred armed Corsairs crowding the rails, would of course bring down the wrath of the Spanish fleet as soon as she was sighted. Smaller galleys, called bergantines, carried only a third as many oarsmen as the galleot that they were now rowing across the Gulf of Cadiz. But on such a tiny vessel it was infeasible, or at least unprofitable, to maintain oar-slaves, and so the rowers would be freemen; rowing alongside a larger ship they’d snatch up cutlasses and pistols and go into action as Corsairs. A bergantine, for that reason, would arouse more suspicion than this (much larger) galleot; it would be seen as a nimble platform for up to three dozen boarders, whereas the galleot’s crew (not counting chained slaves) was much smaller—in this case, only eight Corsairs, pretending to be peaceful traders.
The galleot was shaped like a gunpowder scoop. Beneath the bare feet of the oarsmen there was loose planking, covering a shallow bilge, but other than that there was no decking—the vessel was open on the top along its entire length, save for a quarterdeck at the stern, which in the typical style of these vessels was curved very high out of the water. So any lookout gazing down into the galleot would clearly see a few dozen naked wretches in chains, and cargo packed around and under their benches: rolled carpets, bundles of hides and of linen, barrels of dates and olive oil. A spindly swivel-gun at the bow, and another at the stern, both fouled by lines and cargo, completed the illusion that the galleot was all but helpless. It would take a closer inspection to reveal that the oarsmen were uncommonly strong and fresh: the best that the slave-markets of Algiers had to offer. The ten participants in the Plan were distributed in outboard positions, the better to peer through oarlocks.
“In this calm we’ll have at least a night and a day to await the Viceroy’s ship,” Jack noted.