The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (243 page)

Acapulco, Amboe explained, was far too hot, cramped, and famished to support many Spaniards and so for most of the year its hovels were occupied by the wretched soldiers of the garrison, a few missionaries who did not care whether they lived or died, and people like these: Indians, refuse-slaves, and the like. Only when the Manila Galleon or the Lima treasure-fleet was expected did white men swarm down out of the mountains and kick out the squatters and turn Acapulco into a semblance of a real city. This had just happened a week ago, which explained why so many rabble were camped on the beach at Port Marques; but word had already gotten around that the ship was not the Manila Galleon, and disappointed merchants were already streaming out of town in droves, leaving behind empty buildings that the beach-people would soon move back into.

Naturally all of
Minerva
’s crew wanted to come ashore, but van Hoek only let them do so one watch at a time, and he insisted that men stand by the longboat with muskets. He was worried, in other words, that the Spaniards would try to seize the ship on some pretext, and that she would have to fight her way out onto the main and make for Galápagos or some other pirate-haven. Jack for his part was inclined to believe that the Spaniards would see things their way. If
Minerva
came under attack she would either flee or be sunk, and in either event the quicksilver in her holds would never arrive at the mine-heads of New Spain. And if she were not received hospitably and dealt with fairly, she could sail down the coast to Lima and the quicksilver would end up at Potosí, the greatest mine in the world.

In any event there was a pause while the accounts of Edmund de Ath and Elizabeth de Obregon were sent by express to Mexico City, and (presumably) pondered by important people, and orders sent back by express. This ended up taking sixteen days. Van Hoek never once came ashore, but remained aboard his ship, doing sums in his cabin or pacing the poop deck with a spyglass, scanning the horizon
for armadas. Vrej Esphahnian ventured into Acapulco to procure the wood and other items needed to repair
Minerva
’s foremast. He ended up being absent for two nights and a day, and van Hoek was getting ready to send out a rescue party when a barge emerged from Acapulco Harbor’s broad southeastern entrance and came their way, laden with what they wanted. Vrej was posed insouciantly on a new foremast, and explained the delay by informing them that Acapulco was that rarest of places, an important trade-port without a single Armenian, and so he had been forced to deal with slower minds.

Minerva
’s idlers were now idle no more, as the new foremast had to be stepped and rigged. That procedure might have been interesting to Jack if it had been done in mid-ocean where there was nothing else to look at, but as it was, being on land had reminded him of how much he hated being aboard ship. He spent those days ashore, making friends with diverse Vagabonds and ne’er-do-wells, learning which of them were idiots and which merely independent-minded. Amboe and his band were obviously of the latter type, but most of these beach-people did not have such informative Narrations to tell, and Jack could sound them out only through carousing with them over a period of weeks. Jack had long since lost interest in carousing
per se,
but he recalled how it was done, and could still put on a performance of carousing that looked sincere but was in fact wholly affected, shrewd, and calculating. He was helped in this by his two sons, who really meant it.

Gentlefolk liked to claim that horsemanship was a noble art. If that were true, then half of the renegadoes on the beach at Port Marques were bastard sons of Dukes and Princes. New Spain bred horses the way London bred fleas, and many of these mulattoes and mestizoes could ride like cavaliers, even bareback. Jack of course was the last man on earth who’d ever believe that riding well was a sign of superior breeding. But he did know that riding badly was its own punishment, and that spirited horses could smell fools and poseurs from a mile away. Some of the Port Marques crowd would entertain themselves by roping wild beach-mustangs and riding them up and down the sand, forcing them against their will to gallop into breaking waves. From a musket-shot away Jack could see the white teeth of those riders as they laughed, and later on, as they gathered around driftwood-fires to eat the food of the country (maize flat-bread wrapped around meager helpings of beans and spicy stews), he would seek those men out and try to learn something of them, and he would ply them with rum to see if they had a weakness for liquor. Of all of these, the best man, in Jack’s opinion, was an African named Tomba, a member of Amboe’s band. Tomba was not a refuse
slave; he had escaped from a sugar plantation in Jamaica. The scars on his back confirmed part of his story, which was that he’d fled to avoid being beaten to death by an overseer. The time he’d spent on the plantation, and at the English settlement on Haulover Creek, had given Tomba some knowledge of English, and he spent several long evenings sitting by the fire with Jimmy and Danny Shaftoe talking about what sons of bitches Englishmen were in general.

Almost three weeks after
Minerva
had dropped anchor at Port Marques, Edmund de Ath came out alone one morning from Acapulco, bearing sealed letters from the Viceroy. One was addressed to van Hoek and another to the Viceroy’s counterpart in Lima. Van Hoek opened his in
Minerva
’s dining cabin, in the presence of de Ath, Dappa, Jack, and Vrej.

Moseh’s vow compelled him to remain ashore. Later Jack rowed in on a skiff and found the Jew eating a taco.

“These Vagabond-boots are longing to Stray,” Jack said. “I reckon that tomorrow we will round up a posse of these
vaqueros
and
desperadoes
and begin to assemble a mule-train.”

Moseh finished chewing a bite of his taco and swallowed carefully. “The news is good, then.”

“We are all vile hereticks and profiteers, says the Viceroy, and ought to be whipped all the way to Boston…but Edmund de Ath has put in a good word for us.”

“Is that Ed’s version or…”

“It’s right there in black and white in the middle of the Viceroy’s letter, or so literate men assure me.”

“Very well,” said Moseh, dubiously. “I do not like being beholden to that Jansenist, but—”

“We are beholden to him anyway,” said Jack. “Do you recollect the fellow we had dealings with in Sanlúcar de Barrameda?”

“That
cargador metedoro
? It’s been a while.”

“You don’t have to remember him
personally,
but only the class he belonged to.”

“Spanish Catholics who front for Protestant merchants…”

“…because hereticks are barred from doing business in Spain. You’ve got it.”

“The Viceroy wants our quicksilver,” Moseh said, “but as long as the Inquisition is active in Mexico City, he cannot allow Protestants and a Jew to roam about transacting business in his country. And so he insists that we nominate a Papist to act as our
cargador metedoro
.”

“Just so,” Jack said.

“And—don’t tell me—Edmund de Ath is our man. I am uneasy.”

“You are always uneasy, and more often than not, for the best of
reasons,” Jack said, “but for God’s sake look about you and consider our situation. We must have a Catholic and that is all there is to it. There are many to choose from, but as a Belgian Jansenist, Ed is the least Catholic Catholic we are likely to find, and at least we know something about him.”

“Do we? The only person who can testify as to his character is Elizabeth de Obregon, and she’s been under his spell ever since she came to.”

Jack sighed. “Do I need to tell you that you’ve been out-voted?”

Moseh flinched. “I never should have given any of you voting privileges…that was never part of the Plan.”

“We’re not putting him in control of the ship,” Jack said, “just allowing him to act as our front here and in Lima. He’ll sail down that-a-way aboard
Minerva
and sell whatever quicksilver we do not off-load here. At that point, his role in the enterprise is finished.
Minerva
leaves him on the dock in Lima, rounds Cape Horn, and makes rendezvous with us in Vera Cruz or Havana a year or two later. Edmund de Ath can stay in Peru and try to convert the Incas to Œcumenicism, or he can come back to Mexico…it matters not to us.”

“It matters not to
me
, for my voyaging days have ended,” said Moseh. “If Edmund de Ath tries to do any mischief I’ll put on my poncho and
sombrero
and ride north with saddlebags full of silver.”

“Very well,” Jack said, “but first you had better learn how to ride. It is more difficult than pulling on an oar.”

JULY
1701

“Y
OUR HIGHNESS, WHEN
I
WAS
a boy—rather younger than you are now, hard as that might be to imagine—I was locked out of a library for a time, and I did not care for it at all,” said the bald man leading the young woman down the gallery. “I pray you understand how it has pained me to have locked
you
out of
yours
for the last week—”

“It’s not really mine, is it? The library is the property of Uncle Freddy and Aunt Figgy!”

“But you have made it yours by spending so much time there.”

“While it was closed, you’ve brought me every book I asked for without delay, Doctor. So whyever should I mind?”

“It’s true, Highness, my desire to apologize to you is wholly irrational, Q.E.D.”

“Is it just one of those Barock apologies that courtiers put at the beginnings of letters?”

“I should hope not. An apology may be
heartfelt
without being
rational.
”

“Whereas a courtier’s apology is the opposite,” said the Princess, “in that it is
insincere
but
calculated.
”

“It is well said—but said too loudly,” answered the proud Doctor. “Your voice carries for a mile down these echoing galleries; and a courtier who has just snatched an indiscretion out of the air will prance about to all the salons like a puppy who has just stolen a drumstick.”

“Then let’s in
here,
where my voice will be muffled by books, and where courtiers never venture,” answered Caroline, and paused before the doors to the library, waiting for Leibniz to open them for her.

“Now you will see your birthday present, and I hope you like it,” said the Doctor, drawing a key on a blue silk ribbon from his pocket. The key was a rod of steel having a fabulously ornate handle at one
end, and at the other, a sort of three-dimensional maze carved into a steel cube. He inserted this into a square hole in the door-lock, wiggled it to and fro to make it one with the mechanism concealed inside, then turned it. Before opening the doors, he removed the key from the lock and hung it on its blue ribbon around the Princess’s neck. “Since you cannot carry your present with you, I hope you’ll carry this key as a token. May you never be locked out again.”

“Thank you, Doctor. When I am Queen of some country or other, I shall build you a library greater than that of Alexandria, and give you a golden key to it.”

“I fear that I shall be too old and blind to make good use of the
library
—but I shall accept the
key
with gratitude, and carry it to my grave.”

“That would be irresponsible of you—then no one else would be able to get into the Library!” Caroline answered, with a roll of the eyes, and a sharp sigh of exasperation. “Open the doors, Doctor, I want to see it!”

Leibniz unlatched the double doors, turned around, and backed through them so that he could watch her face. He saw light reflected in her blue eyes: light from high windows all around the room, and from sparking fire-works set in buckets of sand to make it look like one great birthday-cake.

The library had been built two stories high, with a catwalk all around, halfway up, to afford access to the higher shelves, and its walls and the frescoed vault overhead had been generously arched with windows so that “Aunt Figgy” (short for Figuelotte, as Queen Sophie Charlotte was known to her family) and her bookish friends could read into the evening without need of candles. The high windows had been cracked open to let the room breathe in warm summer air and to exhale the smoke from the fizzing sparklers. The frescoes depicted the same assortment of Classical scenes that covered the ceiling of every rich person in Christendom nowadays, though the gods and goddesses had been provided with blond hair and blue eyes so that Jupiter might as well have been Wotan.
Trompe l’oeil
made it look as if the library had no ceiling but was open to the blue skies, and the gods were all springing out of frothy clouds. The writhing columns of smoke from the fireworks spread out against the plaster-work and swirled about to make the illusion that much better.

A cheer and a little song followed, from the dozen or so people who had come to wish Caroline
Glück
on her
Geburtstag
. It was a small party, for a Princess, and it was an older crowd. Sophie was the
eldest of all at seventy-one—she had come out from Hanover, crammed into a carriage with Leibniz and her grandchildren: George August (who was a few months younger than Caroline) and Sophie Dorothea (four years younger yet). Sophie Charlotte (Figuelotte), Queen of Prussia and the mistress and namesake of the palace, was here with her son Frederick William, a legendary brat of thirteen. Filling out the guest list was the motliest collection of metaphysicians, mathematicians, radical theologians, writers, musicians, and poets ever brought together for a princess’s eighteenth birthday.

The Queen of Prussia liked to stage operas, when she wasn’t inciting riotous dinner-table debates among her friends, and the only sense in which she was ever a tyrant was in ordering some poor physicist to don a mad-cap and warble a role for which he was untrained and ill-suited. Princess Caroline had been dragooned, from time to time, to sing a Nymph or Angel part. Nothing, except perhaps for fighting side-by-side in a war, forged bonds among disparate persons so well as performing together on stage, and so Caroline had become a great friend of these grownups, her fellow-sufferers on the boards of the Charlottenburg.

With wine-glasses and sparklers in hand they had gathered round a pedestal that had been built of polished cherry-wood in the center of the library. Surmounting this, and spreading out above the heads of the revelers, was a large spherical object—

“A cage!” Caroline exclaimed.

Dismay flowed over Leibniz’s face. But very soon that emotion gave way to a sort of distracted, intrigued look, as his curiosity had been somehow provoked. He bobbed his head in a way that might have been a nod, or a bow.
“C’est juste,”
he said. “Geometers have, with their parallels and meridians,
ruled
the globe that, being unmarked, save by irregular coastlines and river-courses, seemed wild to eyes that only in
order
could see
beauty.
But one who loves Nature for her
variety
might see the geometers’ devices as a disfigurement—no bird is as beautiful when seen through the bars of a cage, as it is in the wild. But I pray, Highness, that you will construe this rather as an inventory of the known. It is a map of the world, not as flattened out by cartographers, but as it
is
.”

The globe had been set at an angle, as the earth was tilted with respect to the ecliptic. An unexplored portion of the South Pacific bore on the pedestal. Not far away from it, the south pole presented itself just at the level of Caroline’s head. This globe was indeed fashioned like a spherical bird-cage, with curving brass bars following the lines of longitude and latitude. Most of it (the oceans) was open-work. But the continents were curved plates of brass riveted to those
bars. They were mounted to the
inside
of the cage, rather than the outside, so that the bars passed in front of them—at least, for the celebrants who were standing around it. An irregular, wholly factitious continent had been placed around the south pole, representing the hypothetical land of Antarctica, and this had a round hatchway cut into it, and steps leading up to it from the floor.

Dr. Krupa (a Bohemian mathematician who had become a sort of permanent houseguest here) said, “Highness, some have proposed that at the world’s poles are openings where one may descend into the earth’s interior. Here is your opportunity personally to put that hypothesis to the test.”

The Princess appeared to have forgotten that anyone else was in the room, and had not even said hello to Aunt Figgy or to Aunt Sophie. She stood for a moment at the base of the steps, the O of her mouth an echo of the big hole that was about to swallow her up. Even Frederick William shut up for a moment, sensing a
frisson
running through the assembled grownups, but not having the first idea why. That Princess Caroline of Ansbach had once been a little penniless orphan had been long forgot by most. But something about her pose there, below that hole in the Antarctic, unaware of all the people standing about, called to mind the orphan who had showed up on Sophie Charlotte’s doorstep five years ago, escorted by two Natural Philosophers and a brace of Prussian dragoons.

Then she got a smile on her face and climbed up through the hole. The grownups resumed breathing and applauded—giving Frederick William the diversion he needed to loop round behind the crowd and slam George August over the head with a book. Leibniz, who had not spent much time around children, watched this dumbfounded. Then he noticed Sophie regarding him with amusement. “It begins,” she said, “already the boys are vying for Caroline’s attention.”

“Is
that
what they’re doing?” Leibniz asked incredulously as George August,
*
who was five years older than, and twice the size of, his assailant, body-slammed Frederick William
†
against a smaller and more traditional sort of globe that had been shoved into a corner to make way for the new one. The papier-mâché sphere crumpled inward and Frederick William ended up wearing it on his head, making him look like some antipodean creature with a monstrously oversized brain.

These antics had gone unnoticed, or been deliberately ignored,
by Monsieur Molyneux, a Huguenot writer who had been haunting Berlin since his family had been wiped out in Savoy. “Why indeed should we
not
view the world as a cage in which our spirit has been imprisoned?” he reflected.

“Because God is not a prison-warden,” Leibniz answered sharply, but stopped when an elbow even sharper (Sophie’s) caught him in the ribs.

Princess Caroline had taken her seat: a swivel-stool mounted in the middle of the globe. Planting one of her party-shoes at the junction of the Twentieth West Meridian and the Fortieth South Parallel, so that the toe seemed to breach out of the South Atlantic like an immense white whale, she gave a little kick that sent her spinning around. “I’m rotating!” she reported, “the world is revolving around me!”

“Solipsistic, that,” somone remarked drily.

“It is more than that,” Leibniz said, “it is a profound question of Natural Philosophy. How indeed can we tell whether we do stand still in a rotating universe, or spin in a fixed cosmos?”

“
Eeehuhh,
I’m dizzy!” Caroline said, explaining why she had planted her feet, and stopped.

“There’s your answer,” Dr. Krupa said.

“Not at all. You assume that dizziness is a symptom—internally produced—of our spinning. But why might it not just as well be an effect exerted upon us from a distance, by a revolving universe?”

“No one should be forced to listen to metaphysics at her eighteenth birthday-party,” Sophie decreed.

“It’s dark in here,” Caroline said, “I can’t see the maps.”

Wladyslaw—a Polish tenor who sang the lead in just about every one of Sophie Charlotte’s operas—lit a fresh sparkler and handed it through the central Pacific Ocean to Caroline. Leibniz’s view of the girl happened to be blocked by Brazil, but he saw the inside of the sphere light up as the sparkler was drawn into the middle; the freshly buffed brass seemed to ignite as it sieved the light from the air and spilled it out in every direction. For a moment it seemed as if the globe-cage was filled with flame, and Leibniz’s heart ached and pounded with fear that Caroline’s dress had caught fire; but then he heard her delighted voice, and decided that the fear he felt was of something else, of some larger and longer calamity than the fate of one orphan Princess.

“I can see now all the rivers set in turquoise, and all the lakes, too, and forests of green tortoise-shell! The cities are jewels, which the light shines through.”

“It is how the world would look if it were transparent and you could sit in the middle looking outward,” said Father von Mixnitz, a
Jesuit from Vienna who had somehow arranged to get himself invited.

“I am aware of that,” said Caroline, annoyed. A long, irritable silence followed. Caroline was quickest to forgive and forget. “I see two ships in the Pacific, and one is full of quicksilver, and the other is full of fire.”

“I do not recall putting those in the drawings,” Leibniz joked, trying to obey Sophie’s command to lighten things up a bit. “I shall have to have a word with the workmen about that!”

“Consider this, your royal highness,” continued Father von Mixnitz, “you may spin yourself all the way round, three hundred and twenty degrees—”

“Three hundred and
sixty
!”

“Yes, highness, that is what I meant to say—three hundred and
sixty
degrees—and never shall you pass out of sight of the Spanish Empire. Is it not remarkable, how vast, how wealthy, are the dominions of Spain?”

“Aunt Sophie says it may be the dominions of France soon,” Caroline demurred.

“Indeed, the French pretender does sit on the throne in Madrid at the moment…”

“Aunt Sophie says it’s the woman behind that throne who matters.”

“Indeed,” the Jesuit said, twitching his eyes toward Sophie, “many argue that the duc d’Anjou, or King Philip V of Spain as he styles himself, is a mere pawn of the princesse des Ursins, who is herself a notorious soulmate of Madame de Maintenon—but this is beside the point, as Anjou cannot possibly endure long on the Spanish throne, when he is opposed by women far more cunning, more powerful, and more beautiful.”

“Aunt Sophie says she does not care for flatterers,” said the voice from the center of the brass world.

Sophie, who had been about to squash the priest like a bug, now did something rare for her: She hesitated, torn between annoyance with the Jesuit and delight in Caroline.

“It is no flattery, highness, to say that Sophie, in league with King William, or Queen Anne as the case may one day be, is a stronger hand than Maintenon and des Ursins. All the more so if the
rightful
heir to the Spanish throne—Archduke Charles—were wed to a Princess in the mold of Sophie and Sophie Charlotte.”