A single great drum of war beat regular and slow, dinning into my head with rhythmic stabs of pain. Inside my skull-case, a chorus of voices chanted incessantly, accompanied by the jangling of a thousand blades and pikes as if an army marched across a hilltop on their way to battle.
Opening my eyes, I found myself flat on my back in darkness. The moment I tried to rise, that terrible clattering army struck up once more and I fell back defeated. Still the drummer beat his pommel and the skin boomed, and it said treach-er-ee, treach-er-ee, treach-er-ee. After a while, a pale glow swam before me until the beams of a deckhead grew distinct and at last I remembered about ships, and being aboard them. What vessel this might be, I could not tell, but she lurched and yawed, rolling along with a hiss and rush of water inches away outside the wooden walls. We were at sea and going fast.
There came a rustle of movement. Someone glided close.
‘Abigail —’ I began, cracking my painful eyelids wider, but hers was not the face before me. Instead there were the lines and pocks of an old fellow wearing a look of concern, a potful of worry.
‘Eli, is it you?’ I croaked. ‘Some water, if you will.’
‘No-ooooo-ooo,’ wheezed the ancient, and coughed moistly. ‘Not your Eli, I am not he. It is Noah Spatchears, condemned to his cell in perpetuum. And bound to tend his fellow prisoner, for no one else is here.’
‘A sip of water then, for the Lord’s sake,’ I muttered, and gingerly raised myself off the hard shelf bunk. When I put my legs over the side, they clanked as I planted them on the deck-boards. There were shackles round my ankles, connected by a two-foot length of heavy chain links. What, was I imprisoned? For the love of mercy, was it not enough to lose my command without being deprived of liberty too? Then I remembered Abigail on the quarter-deck as the cargo was jettisoned. She had stared at me almost in contempt. My anger dissolved, replaced by oak-hard determination. This downward rush in my fortunes had to end. I resolved that as soon as my body revived, I would turn my mind to escape, and restoration.
The fellow called Noah attended me with a pewter mug.
‘Drink!’ he said, in a high-pitched screech. It rang against my bruised temples like an unoiled sawblade being worked through green wood. Gratefully, I sluiced the liquid into my throat.
‘Drink,’ wailed the old man, ‘for it lubricates the brains of men and frees the discourses of their mind. Quench away, for water is the liquid of life.’
‘This is small beer,’ I said, but nevertheless supped it gratefully. As I revived, I listened to the boom and rumble of rudder chains coming from somewhere deep in the afterparts and realised that it was a great ship were we aboard, much more massive than the Saskia. Gradually it dawned on me it must be Filligrew’s flagship, the Prometheus. Then I remembered the madman — locked in a cell in the warren of rooms near the Great Cabin — who had accosted me as we left with the instruments.
‘Small beer for a large world,’ came the old man’s voice, ‘and for an even greater Universe, extending beyond the reach of sight but not beyond believing, for with diligence and resilience and providence we shall number and mark and divine our progress towards —’
‘Sir, peace a-while, for pity’s sake,’ I said, putting up my hand.
Noah Spatchears backed away as if I had made to strike him. He puckered his lips, folding them back into his toothless mouth, and smacked them rapidly up and down. His eyes watered, the chin trembled and his neck wobbled. I thought the man was breaking down, until he opened his mouth and let out a barking cough that spattered mucus around the cabin, some gobbets of which fell across me. His shoulders shook and he gave in to a fit of such wheezing and drawing that I thought he must die on the spot.
‘Ooo-oooooooh,’ he gurgled, champing his lips and swallowing like a pelican. After sucking several more rattling breaths into his chest, he let out another cry. ‘Help here! Assault, assault! O, salvation from this agent! The tables are turned, give up the tables. No, you cannot wrest them from me. I have burnt them — they are gone!’
This alarming outburst had a markedly poor effect on me. The drum struck up inside my skull with renewed vigour and my eyeballs throbbed in time. A minute more of this and my own mind would become unbalanced.
‘Calm yourself,’ I begged, but he shrilled on, screaming all the louder.
Clambering heavily in my chains into the sanctuary of the upper bunk, troubled and beset by the ranting, I lay down with my hands over my ears. In this disturbed solitude, I could not help but dwell on my condition.
I must have slipped into a half slumber, for I next remember lying awake in the cell listening to the creak and protest of the ship’s beams as she heaved her way along a boisterous sea. It was night still, and the Prometheus ran before a grand swell in half a gale which sent her surging forward, yawing broadly, then lifting her stern to the next wave. In the quiet between the passing rollers came the strains of a low-sung song.
It was Noah Spatchears. He chanted as if to a prayer-string, his voice rising and falling in time with the waves. At first, I set my ears against the chant and dipped between sleep and wakefulness, but by degrees the sounds distinguished themselves into words. Or rather numbers. The song was nothing more than a stream of threes and sixes and twos and noughts — all the single numbers, in lots of four and five at a time. Once or twice, he uttered something like ‘next column’, or he would intone ‘full integer’. After an hour or more of this, I rose up and sipped half-heartedly at my mug of beer, debating whether smothering him to death with his own palliasse could in any way be counted a kindness.
The chanting ceased. Next, there came a voice right by my ear.
‘Sir, I beg pardon for the noise,’ it whispered, ‘but I can hardly keep my mind in this place.’ A fine drizzle of spittle landed on my face as he spoke.
‘So it seems,’ I said, pushing him away. ‘Must you chant these random numbers for hour after hour?’
‘Not random! It is the only way I can remember. You must hear my case.’
‘I care nothing for your case, sir. I want only peace.’
His tone hardened at once. ‘I am a spy for His Majesty the King, and command you to aid the cause.’
The madness again, I thought. ‘I have no wish to act as a spy, not even in the cause of King William.’
The ghostly oval of his face was close. ‘Not he, O no! The King of the Catholicks is for whom I act.’
‘I follow no religious cause,’ I said wearily.
‘My King might be the Pretender, but my cause is the Longitude.’
The Longitude? The very mention of it seared into my consciousness. Filligrew’s words rang in my head: the rewards and riches, the winning of trade, the end of sea wars, my own elusive pardon — and all for finding the Longitude.
I put a hand on his thin arm. ‘What do you have to say about the Longitude?’
‘It is a Catholick cause, nota bene.’ His voice was breathy and conspiratorial. ‘The Pope spends his treasure towards its solution. The faithful Kings likewise fund the endeavour. Once it was Charles and James in England but now the torch is borne aloft by King Louis and young James in France — the Catholick Kings, defenders and pretenders alike. The just and lordly patrons of Papish men everywhere.’
I sighed in despair. ‘It’s the Navigation I’m interested in, not your religious ideas.’
‘UnGodliness rules, but most of all in trade and commerce,’ said the madman, ignoring me. ‘Why, consider insurance — a machination straight from the Devil. It is for Protestants. For bankers.’ His voice rose. ‘Usury is for puritans, ventures are for dissenters!’
‘I see why Filligrew keeps you confined,’ I said in disgust, sickened by the gale of putrid breath and spittle. He could not keep a grip on his thoughts for more than half a sentence without setting up a rant of the purest nonsensickality.
He coughed for a full minute until his lungs had settled. Then he issued a drawn out sigh, a sound resembling a cable groaning at the hawse-hole. Issuing from deep in his gullet, it rose in pitch while I listened in helpless fascination. His features slackened as though the life had been sucked from him, then refilled like the wind ballooning into sails. In an instant, his demeanour changed from lamentation to consuming rage.
‘Spy, spy, spy, spy!’ he screamed, pointing a finger and backing away as far as the narrow cabin allowed. ‘The coffee houses are full of heathen beliefs and nonconformism! The Longitude is the only Godly truth! My quest is for Our Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ!’
‘Get in your bunk and stay quiet,’ I said harshly, ‘or I shall silence you without qualm.’
He did not speak further, but wheezed and groaned the night long. Every minute or two, from his broken, consumptive chest, he brought up gobbets and expelled them with surprising vigour. We passed that night close together in the crowded cell, but worlds apart in our minds.
In the morning, when light came, I spied Commodore Filligrew passing into the passageway. Lurching off the bunk, I shuffled, clanking, to the doorway.
‘Sir Thomas, we must speak together,’ I called. ‘Where are we going? Let me see Abigail!’
The man with whom I had sat in the Great Cabin and conversed over the mysteries of Natural Philosophy and Alchemy and instruments and Methods, the gentleman who was a Fellow of the Royal Society and acquainted with the Astronomer Royal himself, swept past without so much as a word or a glance, preoccupied, his stride not faltering nor his demeanour changing in any regard. He looked past me and headed up the steps quite as though I did not live and breathe half a yard distant. It was as clear as the watch-bell I was no longer worthy of his least attention.
Despairing, I sank to the deck-boards and hung my head. Noah Spatchears lifted me back to the bunk, an effort which sent him into a spasm of chestiness. When the coughing ceased, he called out for food and drink, and rattled our little door and stamped his feet until a seaman came up and left us hard bread and a bowl of cold pottage. The old lunatick guzzled gleefully on his share, while I chewed without relish on a single mouthful and pushed the rest away.
When Spatchears was done eating, his noise began.
‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I beg pardon for last night, as —’
‘I wish you would keep it to yourself,’ I said unkindly. ‘Your madness all but unhinges me.’
‘I am not mad, sir,’ he said in hurt tones, ‘merely ill. Rendered liable to a derangement brought on by fear of the night, and which is peculiar to the hours of darkness.’
I studied him. He was an ancient fellow, tiny of stature, wrenlike, the skin hanging off his bones like loose sacking. True enough, in daylight his countenance was serene and tranquil, utterly changed from the scream and rant of a few hours before.
‘The illness,’ he said, eyes peering intently from the dry folds of his parchment face, ‘mixes up the compartments of my mind with a mash of memories and dreams so that I do not know myself what is right. Chanting numbers through the dark hours is my only handhold on sanity. Yet in the day, as I trust you hear, I am quite compos mentis, as whole in mind and active in thought as any man and better than many.’ He fingered the grubby cuffs of his shirt and eyed me nervously. ‘I observe much, even though I can no longer study the heavens.’
‘You study the heavens?’
‘Until the night fears prevented me.’ He glanced from side to side, then spoke low. ‘But sir, we must fly from here. I have seen where the keys are kept, and where the commodore stows his weapons, and when the guards —’
‘Pass me that broth, Mister Spatchears,’ I said, cutting off his rant. ‘Escape’s out of the question. We’re imprisoned aboard a mighty flagship, surrounded by officers and men, shackled by our feet. It would be more use if you knew our destination, or at what port we might be let off ashore.’ I spooned down the grey liquid. ‘As we sail west, I take it to be Campeechy, perhaps? Or the Silver Coast?’
‘West? How do you know that? There is no window here.’
I observed him closely for a full second, and concluded he truly was not mocking me.
‘By the bark’s motion, of course. We’re rolling and yawing in a downwind way, so we can’t be close-hauled or reaching. And we are going fast — recklessly, I'd say.’
He thought for a few seconds. ‘You cannot conclude our heading is west. The wind or weather might be blowing us to the east, or south, or north.’
This time I laughed out loud. ‘No sir! The tradewind blows only from northeast or southeast. If we’re running before it, we’re heading west.’
‘It seems revealed to you, but not to me,’ he said, staring at the remains of his pottage. ‘After a life labouring at the stars and planets, I know astronomickal directions of all kinds, and nothing about barks or the winds. Yet you can tell all this prima facie — from below decks without sight of the sun or the land?’
‘It’s natural to a sailor,’ I said. ‘And if you, sir, have laboured with the stars, it cannot have been as Navigator on ships.’
‘Most certainly not,’ he said, as if someone had suggested he were a common beggar. ‘For nigh on three decades, I was salaried at the Greenwich Observatory.’
This made me sit up. ‘At Greenwich? As what?’
‘I worked under the Astronomer Royal, on a method for improving the Navigation. You are addressing,’ he said, stretching himself up, ‘Chief Assistant Observator Noah Spatchears.’
‘Did you work, by any chance,’ I asked, suspicion rising, ‘on the Lunar Distance Method?’
‘You know of it? O lucky day, that I should fall upon so sympathetic a gentleman!’
‘Now I see why Filligrew has you here. There are connections.’
‘Perhaps, but connections of an uneasy nature.’
‘Observator Spatchears, in the night, you talked about the Longitude. Was that just the illness?’
He looked hurt again. ‘Do not remind me of the night.’
‘Aye, but can you speak about it sensibly?’
‘I have no one to tell, and no one to trust but you, sir.’ He took a breath, but it caught in his throat. He coughed to clear it, then swallowed something sloppy and glutinous. ‘It is the absolute truth, sir,’ he said at last, ‘that I have in more than a quarter century’s observations collected sightings enough to bring forward in great measure the Lunar Distance Method. It is a great and important work, an advance for finding the Longitude.’
So this must be the secret Filligrew had talked about. Yet Spatchears’ night madness made me sceptickal.
‘No single astronomer, however capable,’ I said, ‘could have completed all those Moon sightings and calculated the predictions. There are millions to be done to make the Lunar Distance Method work. And observations can only be done at night-time, which is the occasion of your illness.’
‘Indeed,’ he said in a defiant tone, ‘but I laboured at the Observatory with twenty waged assistants and scribblers and prentices and clerks under me. These results are not of my own endeavours alone, but of many men’s.’
‘Even if that’s so, still the resulting Method is of great complexity, and far too difficult for use at sea.’
‘No longer! For I have designed new calculations — integers, logarithmick methods and all the advances of Mathematicks to refine the Navigator’s sightings and angles into the necessary numbers. The modus operandi is quite practickal in use, for my systems simplify the sums needed to compute a Longitude such that the least of arithmetickers may do it, even mariners.’
I could not stifle a snort of laughter. ‘Shooting the Moon from the deck of a bark? Have you tried it yourself, sir?’
‘At sea? No, indeed. But I have worked it on terra firma.’
‘So your instruments are on land, set up firmly and kept steady, perhaps with tripod legs?
‘Indeed so, on the hill above Greenwich overlooking the great river.’
‘And you have never raised the cross-staff on deck, in a seaway, at night, with the bark lifting and dipping?’
‘I am no mariner, sir!’ he spluttered.
‘That’s clear, Observator Spatchears. The cross-staff is six-foot long and very hard to aim at any given star. With the sea’s motion, the bar jumps and dives, the star leaps away, your hand slips on the transom slide, and time and again you miss getting the angles.’
‘O indeed, I understand the difficulty,’ conceded old Noah, ‘but when you do get an angle, then have you only to observe the Moon’s limb.’
‘Within a very brief time, is that not so?’
‘Indeed, you must set a minute-glass and hasten.’
‘Hasten about a lurching deck at night, trying not to fumble with the cross-staff,’ I pointed out. ‘Now, if the Moon is obliging and reveals herself between racing clouds just the instant of a fly’s wingbeat, you might be able to freeze the sphere and read the sight. You have to be quick to capture the angle, for if the minute-glass has run its seconds through, then the Moon has moved too far and you must begin again.’
Noah Spatchears tried to interrupt but I raised my hand.
‘Any Navigator, sir, is bound to point out,’ I went on, ‘that though your Method may be logical, its practickal use at sea is another matter entirely.’
Spatchears leaned forward. ‘No, sir. The task is made easy by my tables. The Navigator has Napier’s help too, and not more than forty five or fifty separate sums to calculate. Then, ceteris paribus, he need only find the columnar for his day and date, reckon the hour of night in local time, enter the arithmeticks to select his estimated latitude and —’
‘Exactly!’ I cried, shaking my head. ‘Far too difficult.’
‘But you have not seen the works. My new tables reduce the matter by an order of magnitude.’
‘Perhaps, but as I understand it, for most latitudes, the necessary observations are barely begun. How many are contained in your tables?’
He smiled shyly. ‘I have completed all the necessary observations for many dozens of the important lines of latitude, including most of those for the Narrow Seas, the greater part of the Middle Sea and almost all for the northern Tropick latitudes.’
I sat up quickly.
‘Truly? Then that is a most astonishing advance,’ I said. ‘But how do your tables compare with those few already published by Astronomer Royal Flamsteed?’
Instantly, his voice rose to a wail. ‘John Flamsteed! Dam’ his eyes! Dam’ his soul!’
I reached over and gripped his arm. ‘Hush, sir. Why do you dam’ Flamsteed?’
‘O, the obstinacy! He refuses to publish my works. He maintains that only the complete works may be printed — for all latitudes and positions, for all the Moon’s variances, and for all the observable stars too. But that is the task of many, many years more. Meanwhile, he rails against the tables already published, saying their errors are too many, and their incompleteness a cause of mishap. So he delays, because he controls all Naval publishing.’
For sure, this tallied with some of what Filligrew had told me.
‘He refuses to print anything,’ said the Observator, ‘yet it is his own works that are poor, not these of mine. In truth, he wishes only to deflect blame from his own person.’
Another thought entered my mind. ‘If Flamsteed is withholding the works, how did you come by them? Did you steal them from the Observatory?’
‘No, no, they are mine by rights to give to the world,’ he insisted. ‘They are paid for by the publick purse, after all. I desire only to see them in Navigators’ hands. When I fell out with Flamsteed, he turned me penniless from the Observatory, casting me aside after a lifetime’s service. I freed the observations from their captor. They lie aboard here now, as we speak.’
‘They are back in Sir Thomas’s safe keeping then,’ I said, ‘while you sound like a Catholick spy and may be bent on sending them to France.’
‘That is merely my night ranting. I have faith in the tables and only wish to see their commercial and politickal value benefit England. Inter alia, many lives may be spared from drowning at sea, both Catholick and Protestant.’ He leaned close. ‘Filligrew is the traitor. He will sell to the highest bidder, to whoever pays the handsomest price, of whatever faith or nation, whether to publish them or to keep them hidden. Even to destroy them.’
I shook my head. ‘The commodore knows Flamsteed. He’ll return the observations to Greenwich.’
‘Not true, not true,’ said the Assistant Observator. ‘It is I who knows Flamsteed, and Filligrew who claims the honour. Sir Thomas is a liar — a master of politicking and trickery.’
‘The trickery I have seen myself,’ I said, abashed.
‘Then accept my story, sir.’ Spatchears’ face loomed unpleasantly close. ‘You must help me get the observations to England. Take them to England, sir, O please take them! You owe it to your fellow Navigators and seamen.’
‘I cannot go to England,’ I said, pushing him off. ‘I’m a wanted man, for all I know already condemned by the Admiralty Court. If I set foot in the country, I shall be arrested and hanged by the Navy.’
‘They must never go to the Navy,’ said Spatchears, his head waving from side to side. ‘Not the Navy, for they would pass them to Flamsteed. The tables must go to my patron, a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Curator of Experiments, who would publish them directly, and for all to use.’
I cocked my head. ‘Isn’t Filligrew himself a Fellow?’
‘More lies and falsity,’ said the astronomer. ‘He shall never be elected, for his ideas are stolen from others.’ Now Spatchears was clutching at my shirt. ‘O sir, how perfect it is. Take my tables to the Royal Society and my patron might use his influence to your benefit. His name is Robert Hooke, Esquire, most highly regarded in Court circles. Think of it — the tables need only save a single one of His Majesty’s barks to release the Sovereign’s unbounded gratitude.’
Spatchears’ words echoed Filligrew’s of a day or two earlier, of how the tables would win favours and prestige and influence.
‘Do you think, Observator Spatchears,’ I said slowly, ‘your tables might be worth a free pardon?’
‘O, free pardons for ten murderers would seem a nothing! Listen, my good sir, you must break out straightaway and escape to England.’ He let his voice drop to a whisper. ‘I know where he hides the tables. And the keys.’
I sat back and considered our condition, captive and chained. The old astronomer babbled on about the commodore’s keys and drawers as if escape were the matter of a moment’s thought. Even if I could break out of this cell, to where would I run?
‘Perhaps your madness does come in daylight, sir,’ I said miserably, briefly succumbing to a wave of desolation and despair.
Then I spied two figures passing in the passageway outside, one of them a deck-officer of Filligrew’s. He was in close conversation with none other than Seth Jeffreys. So he was already ensconced aboard, no doubt dragging his daughter in his wake, and speedily making himself indispensable in the commodore’s commercial affairs. The merchant spied me the same instant I laid eyes on him. He hesitated a moment as if he weighed going on or stopping, but the chance of tormenting me held sway. On his sharp features as he approached the barred door was a smirk of gratification at the tum of events.
‘Why, if it is not Captain Loftus,’ he said delightedly. ‘Or should I say, former captain?’
He spoke all unaware of how he altered the workings of my mind. Within the time it took the Prometheus to surge along the blue Caribbee Sea no more than her own length, desolation flew like a bird from my shoulders and in its place came a will to act, to strike back. The deck-officer caught my black look, but not Mister Jeffreys, who ploughed on quite unaware.
‘I trust your quarters are gracious enough, commanding as you do a space suited to a single fat porker. And your servant here — does he attend you well, and not spit into your food?’
He gave out his high laugh, the one he used in Whitby to inform a collier-master that the payment on his owings had risen by ten shillings the month, knowing it spelt the man’s ruin. Or telling a sixpence-a-day bargehand that the Justice in the courthouse had cut the wage rate and there was nothing to be done but accept starvation as a Fate from the Good Lord.
Before the laugh was fully out of the merchant’s throat, I was at the cabin door and in a flint’s spark had reached through and got him by the collar.
‘Traitorous snake!’ I shouted into his blinking face, but before I got another inch with my revenge, the officer’s boot came between the bars and struck upwards into my low belly. It was a vile place to kick a man, but a first-rate defence for Jeffreys. The air left my chest with a groan and I let the merchant go, sinking to my knees with my hands between my legs.
The officer lifted his sea-boot once more and drove it on to my chin. The blow clacked my jaw-bones together and threw me backwards. I slumped sideways on to the cabin floor, shrinking away from the flailing boot still thrashing between the bars.
‘Beat him!’ I heard Jeffreys cry. ‘Flog the rogue till he begs for relief!’
Pressed in the cell’s corner, I hoped the officer’s kicks could no longer reach. But with poor timing, the ship gave a great roll and sent me sliding helplessly down towards the bars. I braced for renewed blows, yet the kicking never came.
It had been no ordinary ship’s roll. The Prometheus lurched violently and heaved her stern about in a sickening manner. From above came a cacophony of gear clattering aloft and sails going aback, mingled with shouts from seamen and cries from the poop. Alarmed, the officer forgot about me and promptly disappeared up the companion. Jeffreys, left unprotected, slunk off to the Great Cabin.
‘The dam’ schemer,’ I muttered, ejecting a mouthful of bloody spittle as the ship yawed about.
‘What’s happening?’ cried Noah Spatchears. ‘Are we attacked?’
‘It sounds,’ I said through swelling lips, ‘as if we've brought up all standing. I shouldn’t be surprised if we lose a spar or two. Who’s running this blasted ship?’
From the multitude of shouted orders and cries of alarm reaching us from above, a distinct voice called imperiously down the companion.
‘Bring Loftus on deck this minute.’
It was Sir Thomas’s command. There came a commotion in the passageway, and a band of men entered the cell in a rush.