In 1775 Rooke turned thirteen and Dr Adair took his talented pupil with him to Greenwich to meet his friend the Astronomer Royal.
It was further from home than Rooke had ever travelled. He spent the journey staring from the coach window at everything that passed, all as unfamiliar as darkest Africa. Every muddy hamlet was unknown, every gawping farmhand was a stranger. By the end of the day he was drunk with novelty.
Dr Vickery was a man of middle age with a heavy-jowled face and sleepy eyes that slid away. Rooke recognised that: he also found it hard to meet the eyes of another person.
He was too overwhelmed by being in the long-windowed hexagonal room where Halley had calculated the movements of his comet to respond properly to the greeting of the Astronomer Royal. But Dr Vickery was not troubled by the boy’s awkwardness. He drew him over to the wall to which was attached an enormous quarter-circle of brass, the calibrations about its edge as finely etched as the chasing on Dr Adair’s gold watch.
‘Master Rooke, I know you will find this quadrant of interest. Eight feet radius, and do you observe the marking of the arc plates? Done by Bird of London by the method of continual bisection.’
He shot a look at the boy, who knew about quadrants only from books and had no idea what the method of continual bisection might be.
‘Forgive me my enthusiasm, Master Rooke. Do you know, there are days when I wait impatiently for night, unlike the rest of the human species. So much so that my wife says I must have something of the bat in my constitution!’
It was a joke, Rooke saw. The man was trying to put him at his ease. But he also thought that Mrs Vickery had put her finger on an odd and leathery quality to the man.
He was at Greenwich for two weeks and felt, for the first time in his life, that he was in the right place.
Dr Vickery showed him the mysteries of the quadrant and the Dollond telescope, let him wind one of the clocks made by Mr Harrison, its brass wings folding and stretching, folding and stretching, and the delicate ratchet advancing notch by notch. He taught him the moves of chessmen, demonstrated the dangerous power of the seemingly helpless pawn, set him the problem of the Knight’s Tour to see what he could make of it.
In the Observatory library Rooke could not settle. As he read one book, another caught his eye, and then another. There was a boy at the Academy who was like that about buns, reaching for a third even while the first was in his mouth and a second in his hand.
On Dr Vickery’s recommendation he tried to follow Euler’s analysis of the motions of comets. He read Kepler’s account of how each of his errors had cancelled out the other and revealed the truth concerning the shape of orbits. He gulped down the journal of the great Captain Cook, and wanted to read Mr Banks’ account of New South Wales too, but had only time to skim the contents: Quadrupeds—ants and their habitations—scarcity of people—implements for catching fish—canoes—language.
At the end of his stay, Dr Vickery gripped the boy’s hand and patted him on the shoulder, the two of them smiling past each other. Then he presented Rooke with a copy of his Nautical Almanac for 1775. He opened it at the flyleaf so Rooke could read the inscription: To Master Daniel Rooke, an astronomer of the fairest promise.
Two years later, just before he turned fifteen, Rooke’s schooldays came to an end. He wrote to Dr Vickery hinting for a position at the Observatory, or in another observatory, anywhere he might go on watching the heavens and performing solitary calculations.
Dr Vickery had to explain that the world did not need astronomers in any great quantity. Not even the Astronomer Royal could get young Rooke an appointment. Not until some other man died.
It was never put as baldly as that, but Rooke took the point. He must look elsewhere. For a boy born into his station in life, no matter how quick to catch on to Euclid, no matter how perfect his pitch, the best prospect was not a mile from home.
He might have enlisted in the navy, but naval commissions were too dear. His Majesty’s Marine Forces, Portsmouth Division, was the place for men like him: he would become a soldier of the sea. Promotion was slow, but commissions were cheaper.
Rooke knew his timing was lucky. War with the American colonies was giving the king a bottomless hunger for men, even for a studious boy who had no instinct for a fight. The Americans were daily expected to collapse. The rebels were barefoot, it was said, their guns nothing more than sticks.
Rooke showed Anne and Bessie where he was going, watching his sisters’ pale soft hands turning the globe he had made out of wire and paper carefully cut and glued. Making it had been a way of passing the difficult hours of the last days before he boarded his ship. His Majesty’s Marines promised a life of some sort, but waiting to start that life was an awkward time of hope and apprehension mixed, suspended between one existence and another.
‘The same latitude, more or less,’ he said. ‘See Boston here? But quite a different longitude, of course.’
Bessie was too young even to pretend to follow, did not, in any case, have that kind of mind. At eleven, Anne wanted to think it through.
‘So it will be a different time? When we are having dinner, you will be eating breakfast. If you could travel quickly enough you might have two breakfasts and two dinners!’
He put his arm around her and hugged her. He would miss his clever sister. She was the one person in the world with whom he had never needed to pretend to be someone else.
He was issued with the uniform, the white breeches, the red jacket with the braid and the regimental brass buttons. They gave him a musket and taught him how to load the powder and lead ball into the muzzle, ram the wadding down tight against them, pour powder into the pan to prime the charge.
It was an ingenious machine, its smooth metal parts operating by satisfying logic. The trigger caused the flint to fall, the falling flint made a spark against the striker plate, the spark caused the powder in the pan to explode and set off the charge behind the ball, propelling it along the barrel. It was as pleasing in its sequence as a sextant whose mirrors and slots told you where the sun was in the sky.
In due course he got his commission as second lieutenant and was assigned to His Majesty’s ship of the line Resolution. As he sat in the tender watching the ship grow larger he determined that this would be a fresh start. No one knew him here: Daniel Rooke, so clever he was stupid. Along with the new red coat and the musket on its strap over his shoulder, he could put on a brand-new self.
By chance his hammock in the bowels of Resolution hung next to that of a man who could not have been more different from himself.
Talbot Silk was small and quick of make, his narrow face and overly thin mouth far from handsome but transformed by an eager liveliness that was hard to resist.
‘Now Rooke,’ he said that first afternoon, when the quartermaster had showed them their hammocks and left them to it. ‘There’s a good fellow, I beg you to tell me straight, are you a snorer? Because if you are, we will have to come to an arrangement.’
‘Why no,’ Rooke began, ‘that is, I do not know, how can I know? I, well, that is, you will have to tell me whether I am or not.’
Silk gave him a wry look, had already summed up his neighbour and forgiven him.
‘By Jove, Rooke, I can see that you and I will get on famously. I will stay awake tonight on purpose and let you know in the morning. Now come with me, I happen to know that there are not enough dumplings to go around tonight, so let us be Johnny-on-the-spot, eh?’
Silk was disliked by no one: he was cordial, amusing and easy, always in the right place with just the right words. It was rumoured, among the more malicious of his fellow officers, that his father was a dancing master. It was true that he was light on his feet in a conversation. He could amuse others with a droll quirk of the eyebrow and a dry tone of voice, was a storyteller who could turn the most commonplace event into something entertaining.
Silk’s charm had already taken him far: only two years older than Rooke, but already first lieutenant, and with his lively eyes on the next prize. War was no more than an opportunity on the way to the creation of Captain Silk.
With Silk beside him as a model of how it was done, Rooke worked at inventing an acceptable version of himself for use in the rough camaraderie of the officers’ mess. He learned how to exchange a banality or two. He steeled himself to return the gaze of others. Watching the games of cup-and-walnut that the lieutenants played on the mess table, he could see that winning was simply a matter of becoming deaf to the patter, and thought he would like to take a turn, but was too shy.
The new Daniel Rooke was not entirely unlike the old one. He was still a quiet fellow who liked to hang back in the shadows, and forgot himself so far one night as to accept the challenge of multiplying 759 by 453 in his head. At the Academy that would have opened him to mockery, but on board Resolution it seemed nothing worse than remarkable.
He supposed that in the little world of a ship, such a talent made him useful to know. A man standing beside a clever duffer might enjoy some reflected glory from his gifts.
At dinner in the mess, Rooke could laugh along with everyone else at Silk’s description of what the bosun had said when he dropped the double block on his foot. He could turn to his neighbour and share the joke, just another lieutenant enjoying himself. After dinner he could raise his glass with all the others and join them in shouting the favourite toast of junior officers hopeful of advancement: to war and a sickly season!
Resolution blockaded Boston Harbour and did the Atlantic run with supplies to His Majesty’s forces in the colony, but for Rooke’s first year aboard her she was not involved in the fighting. War was a leisurely thing, in which a young man who knew how to reckon the position of the ship by the lunar distance method and had a copy of the Almanac inscribed by the Astronomer Royal was useful on the quarterdeck.
Rooke supposed he should have known that a ship was a floating observatory, but it came as an unexpected gift. Not quite an astronomer, but at least a navigator, he spent his days steadying the sextant and then in the large quiet light of the Great Cabin working through the arithmetic of longitude and latitude. On board Resolution his talents seemed at last to have found a home.
When the ship put into Antigua, in the Leeward Islands, for supplies, Silk was full of a scheme. Someone had told him about a certain house, at the end of a certain laneway up the hill behind English Harbour, where a group of red-blooded young British officers would be made welcome.
‘Yes, you too!’ he insisted. ‘Think of it as part of your education if you must, Rooke, at least as important as trigonometry or Greek!’
Rooke did not take much convincing. He was glad to have an opportunity to make certain discoveries one could guess at from the shapes of one’s sisters and their friends, but which he knew would never be learned except from experience.
Once ashore, Silk led the straggle of junior officers as confidently as if he had visited English Harbour and its delights a hundred times. He strode along the quay, turned left at a house with brilliant geraniums dripping red down its white wall, and went on into the heart of the town.
Everywhere Rooke saw the black faces of the slaves that Lancelot Percival had spoken of. He saw women in a muddy yard, doubled over tubs scrubbing away at laundry, shouting to each other above the splashing. He paused to listen, hearing a language like nothing he had ever heard before: not Latin, not Greek, not French, none of the languages he had studied at the Academy, sounds as opaque to his understanding as if he were a baby. He took a few steps into the yard to hear better, but Silk shouted to him to come along Mr Rooke, come along now, we are not here to wash our underlinen!
As they walked through the streets he saw slaves harnessed into carts, hauling the firewood and water of the garrison. On the edge of town black men and women swayed along with huge bundles of cane or baskets full of pineapples balanced on their heads. In the fields others crouched over the squares where they planted the cane, their skin gleaming with sweat.
Even when they passed close by on the narrow streets, Rooke noticed that the slaves never looked him in the face. It must be a thing they were taught: never to look a white man in the face. Their own features were exotic, powerful, as if carved from a stronger medium than the insipid putty of English faces.
But he was shy to look too hard.
Seeing for himself a system in which a man could be bought and owned, as one might buy a horse or a gold watch, Rooke found that Lancelot Percival’s abstractions about the collapse of the British Empire did not convince. The slaves were utterly strange, their lives unimaginable, but they walked and spoke, just as he did himself. That speech he had heard was made up of no sounds he could give meaning to, but it was language and joined one human to another, just as his own did.
He still did not know how to rebut Lancelot Percival’s logic concerning the collapse of the British Empire, but now that he had seen the slaves he knew this: they were not the same as a horse or a gold watch.
Silk strode on, up the hill behind the port, along a narrow laneway into a hamlet of rough dwellings where hens pecked and lame dogs barked at the men in their red coats. At the end of the last stony alley, he knew which door to knock at.
The woman Rooke was given—large, handsome, brown-skinned, red-lipped—watched as he bashfully lowered his breeches. He never forgot her face, shrewd and amused, as she exclaimed, ‘Bless you, boy, you are hung like a damned horse!’
Newton’s calculus, the lunar distance method of determining longitude, and this other business: it was a private reassurance that he was a natural at least at a few things.
Life in His Majesty’s service unspooled itself day by day in a manner he saw no reason to think would ever end. The service gave a shape to his life, allowed him to play with the brass machines and the numbers, even offered him the nearest thing to comrades that he was ever likely to have. When he thought back to the boy counting his pebbles on the beach under the Round Tower, he realised that, contrary to all his expectations, he had found a life.