Barkskins. Annie Proulx

sail in two weeks. It is already April, late in the season to begin this voyage. We must catch the southwest monsoon winds that carry ships to India and China between June and September, so make ready and be here on the appointed day. I will show you your quarters, which you will share with Mijnheer Toppunt,” he said, and he led Duquet to a pitifully small and rank cubby, though there was a scuttle. His bunk was a wide plank. The other contained a roll of grey blankets and a great leathern bag. On the floor, as though tossed there, were sea boots and heavy gloves, and that constituted Mijnheer Toppunt’s presence.

      Ashore the next day Duquet ordered three dozen cases of the green-label gin delivered to the ship. At the ship chandler’s shop he outfitted himself with a hammock, rough, sturdy clothes and an oiled cape sworn to keep rain out, a bound ledger, quills and ink, an expensive spyglass and a bag of brown sugar.

      A week before they sailed, Captain Verdwijnen hailed him. “Monsieur Duquet,” he said. “I am going to the coffeehouse to arrange my insurance. As you propose to get into business, perhaps you would like to accompany me for the valuable contacts?” Certainly Duquet would. What a stroke of fortune.

      They walked for twenty minutes before they reached the coffeehouse and entered a large room where men sat at tables with papers and account books in front of them. Some scribbled furiously, others talked, pushing their faces forward. At the back of the room five bewigged men laughed as a sixth read from a letter. Near the front a woman handed bowls of hot beverage to serving boys and Captain Verdwijnen called out for two coffees—“deux cafés”—and led Duquet to the back table of laughing men, the marine insurance brokers. As they approached, the laughing faded away and six serious and attentive faces turned toward them.

      “Ah, Captain Verdwijnen. Here to arrange your insurance, no doubt? Would this gentleman with you be the shipowner?”

      Captain Verdwijnen’s laugh was a bray. “No, no, he is not the owner of the ship, he is Monsieur Duquet, a gentleman from New France in the timber export business. At the moment he is carrying furs. I thought he might like to meet you gentlemen for future consultations.”

      The serving boy brought the coffee. Duquet looked suspiciously at the sinister black liquid. It was scalding and bitter, a very dreadful potion, but he drank it. In a quarter of an hour he felt ideas rushing into his head—he memorized the faces before him with newly sharpened senses.

      As he looked around he saw a man of about thirty-five with a face that seemed made of some flesh-like material that, once formed, remained set and immobile. A pair of little obsidian eyes looked out at the world as if measuring an antagonist. The unsmiling mouth was pinched and suggested meanness. The ringed fingers and flamboyant crimson sleeves did little to soften the impression of suspicious calculation.

      The man’s gaze rose from the black sums he was making and fixed on Duquet. The space between them quivered with a discharge of mutual antipathy.

      “Who is that man?” Duquet murmured to the captain, letting the words slip out quietly.

      “He is a Lübeck trader in wax and metal ores I believe—here and in Bruges. How he does stare! It is as if he knows you.”

      “He does not know me, nor will he ever know me,” said Duquet, but the man’s stiff look indicated that he was familiar with the likes of Duquet through and through; it was the stare of a predator encountering another of its kind nosing about in its territory.

       12

       Steenarend

      The ship’s crew was polyglot: Spanish, French, Flemish, Greek, German, Genoese, young men from the Malay, from the Canaries, the Isle of Dogs. Duquet thought they looked dangerous, very unlike the rough-cut good-natured voyageurs he had known in New France.

      Captain Outger Verdwijnen served as his own master and, in this time of dead reckoning and anxious guesswork on the exact location of one’s ship, had a reputation for accurate navigation, which Duquet thought might be related to the man’s constant study and annotation of charts, but the captain said the charts told nothing of a ship’s ever-changing longitudinal position, the bête noire of international trade. But he could recognize the warm black Kuroshio Current, and was often within forty miles of the desired port, by which margin men generally considered him an expert navigator.

      The captain’s bonhomie evaporated the instant he stepped aboard the Steenarend, though he continued his cordiality with Duquet over a glass of the yellow-eyed jenever in the evenings. His conversation was lively, of ships and their cargoes, of their short lives and the myth of hundred-year-old ships, of pirates and great storms at sea. He described the Sunda Strait as treacherous, the equatorial Doldrums as maddening, the Guinea Current as a trap and getting caught in the southeasterly trade winds as the sure failure of a voyage.

      As they sailed out into the quilted ocean Duquet noticed three or four ships were always in sight. When he remarked on it, Captain Verdwijnen said knowingly, “My friends—vrienden,” smiled and shrugged.

      The ship stank fearfully though Captain Verdwijnen was proud of the pissdales and the officers’ closeted seats of ease with their drains into the sea. The crew perched on an open row of holed seats in the beak, cursing when the icy waves rinsed their salt-raw backsides.

      “For we learned from the Portuguese that this is the way to avoid what they called bicho do cu, a painful anal infection so burning and biting that seamen went mad with the agony in the olden times,” said the captain.

      To Duquet the officers looked a rather seedy lot in comparison with the younger crew, though when he made the remark, Captain Verdwijnen laughed and said appearances were deceiving, that while most of the crew looked strong they were riddled with venereal diseases, were laced through with insanities and as stupid as penguins. The officers, on the other hand, were not an attractive lot but each was skilled and experienced in a useful way.

      Duquet’s cabinmate, François Toppunt, was a pockmarked man whose narrow arms and fleshless face gave him a look of weakness, dispelled by his agility. He dressed smartly in contrast with the crew in their tarry red nap trousers cut high and wide and the caps they knitted themselves. He was as limber as a dancing master, with a knack for making lightning decisions. He thought he had been born in Bourgogne and brought as a young boy to Amsterdam. When his parents both died of the plague he had been adopted by watchmaker Willem Toppunt and his childless wife.

      There were similarities between the two men. They both moved at high speeds in body and mind, both were pleased to be able to converse in French, although Toppunt’s use of the language was crippled by long neglect and interlarded with Dutch words and phrases. He was also a devotee of the sailors’ great pastime, collecting rarities of the natural world. He told Duquet that in his home cabinet of curiosities he had a set of spider teeth and a stuffed bird of paradise, that strange vogel born without feet. Then he told Duquet that the captain’s mastiff enjoyed climbing into the rigging, where he would bark a warning at the sight of pirates.

      A few days after he came on board Duquet confided to François Toppunt that he wanted to order new clothing and a wig that would be ready when they returned from China.

      “You will have to pay in advance,” said Toppunt, “but I know a good tailor in Paris and there are wigmakers in the same street. There are yet five days before we sail. Let us persuade the captain for leave, take a coach to Paris and visit these worthies, for I, too, would like a wig for special occasions.”

      The jolting coach nearly liquefied their livers and Duquet chose to get out and run alongside the equipage at every chance. In Paris they found an inn near the street of wigmakers and tailors.

      The next sunrise brought one of those blue and spicy days when the wind cleared away noisome odors. It was a fine day for walking and Duquet and Toppunt strode through the streets. Toppunt pointed out a popular