The King - Dewey Lambdin

"They look as though they sleep armed to the teeth," Alan commented to Mr. Brainard, the sailing master. Once he was in warmer waters Brainard had shucked most of his woolen clothing for light cotton or nankeen, and looked particularly keen and energetic once more.

"If one wants to stay alive in Macao, one does," Brainard said with a chuckle. "The most sinful city on the face of this earth, no error. Too much money to be made here, too many temptations to steal or murder for it. And engaged in the opium trade as they are, they're on the razor's edge. Who knows when the mandarins'll decide to take 'em and strangle 'em for smuggling? You can't trust anyone except the members of the Co Hong up-river not to cheat you or pirate you for your shoe buckles! Man who'll trade with you one trip'll have you killed the next, and them not a week apart."

There were eight rules for traders from the outside world in the Pearl River. No foreign-devil warships above the Bogue at the mouth of the river. No women, guns, spears or any arms allowed at the factories, or hongs, in Canton. All ships had to register at Macao, as well as all river pilots and ship's compra-dores. Each factory could have no more than eight Chinese working for them, so the fewest people would be contaminated by foreign-devils. Foreigners had to forego the pleasures of sailing the river for pleasure. Only on holidays could foreigners go to the Flower Gardens or the Honam Joss House, and then no more than ten at a time and only when accompanied by a linguist. They could not stay out after dark, or carouse. Foreign-devils could not present petitions to the native Viceroy; everything had to go through the Co Hong's eight members. The Co Hong could not go into debt with foreigners. Smuggling was forbidden. And lastly, foreign-devil ships could not loiter about outside the river but must go directly to Whampoa, instead of "selling to rascally natives goods subject to duty, that these may smuggle them, and thereby defraud his Celestial Majesty's revenue."

It was also, Alan learned, against his Celestial Majesty's law to teach foreign-devils Chinese, so trade was carried on in a mix of Portugee, Chinese and English called "pidgin," the closest the Chinese could come to saying "business."

Anything, anything that upset the touchy mandarins could bring a total cessation of trade, which hurt everybody, so merchantmen had to obey "tremblingly," as the Chinese officials concluded their documents. Yet, at the same time, a lively and illegal trade went on down-river at Lintin Island and at Nan'ao. Brainard had even told of mandarin boats ordered to enforce the ban against smuggling, and the opium trade, which contracted lucrative deals, and smuggled the stuff up to Canton themselves!

"Tonight, this lorcha'U be receiving a government mandarin on her decks," Brainard explained. "He'll get his tobacco and wine, warn about lingering in the estuary instead of going direct to Whampoa, and then he'll get down to brass tacks. 'How many chests?' he'll ask, and we'll tell him outright. Then he'll figure out what he thinks we're worth and ask for his singsong."

"He'll want a serenade?" Alan grinned. "God help him if Mister Twigg takes his bagpipers along, then."

"No, his sing-song is his cut. His cumshaw … his custom. 'Allee same same sing-song, allee same custom.' " Brainard laughed. "After he's been feted and bought off, that's the signal for the real traders to come aboard and purchase. Then the lorcha comes back to Macao full of silver. Taels and taels of the bloody stuff, maybe five or six lac with the amount of opium we have on board, young sir. A lac, let me inform you, is worth about ten thousand pounds."

"Merciful God!" Alan gasped in awe.

"And you'd better believe the custom official ashore yonder in Macao knows exactly what we're doing here, and our 'chop' will conveniently not arrive aboard 'til we've disposed of the opium, so we can sail up-river innocent as newborn babes. Gad, what a country!"

"So what are the chances of our suspected French privateers being at this Lintin Island, sir?" Alan asked.

"Depends on whether they've arrived or not. We may ask about, but not too much, else we'd raise too much suspicion. Might even affect the price of our cargo." Brainard frowned. "If they've looted all the ships we suspect they have, what they didn't have to share out to their native associates, they might already be up-river off Whampoa, pie-faced innocent as any other merchantmen."

"Then they'd be a big ship, like us, sir?" Alan pressed.

"Possibly. Something fast, like one of their latest seventy-four-gunned Third Rates converted to a merchantman, like us. But that pretty much describes half the ships in the world that could get here. If they came here at all."

"Well, sir," Alan speculated, "they'd have to dispose of their ill-gotten gains somewhere. Why not here?"

"Oh, I'll grant you that. Sooner'r later, they'd be stuffed bung to the deck-heads with loot," Brainard snorted. "But, they could drop it at He de France in the middle of the Indian Ocean, at Pondichery or Chandernargore, and ship it home on a Compagnie des Indies ship with no one the wiser."

"But they've taken Indiamen and country ships loaded with silver or opium. The silver they could keep, maybe load it into a second vessel. But the opium would have to be sold here. Where else is there such a market for it, and where else on the Chinese coast would the mandarins collude with 'em?"

"Which is why we're here, young sir. We may not be right, but it is a strong chance. Once we're up at Whampoa, and at Canton, I'll warn you to keep a weather-eye peeled for anything out of the ordinary."

"As if China isn't enough out of the ordinary, sir," Alan said with a shrug. "I doubt if I'd know what to look for."

"I leave that to our super-cargoes, Twigg and Wythy. They know the trade well as anybody."

"And pirates," Alan muttered under his breath.

"I know, that cut a bit rough on you, to see what Twigg did," Brainard said comfortingly. "But they'd have gotten the same after an Admiralty proceeding, stretched by the neck by 'Captain Swing.' Wish we'd had the time to hunt down their anchorage and chastise 'em just a bit more."

"I was thinking more of the way he got his information, sir."

"And not much of that, either. I've spent years out here in the Far East and the Great South Seas. It's the way of things out here. Something to leave behind you once you get back into the Bay of Bengal, or the Cape of Good Hope. Don't fret on it."

"If you say so, sir," Alan replied. "But seeing that made me feel a lot less guilty about my own faults. I don't think I could ever torture a man to death. Or feed him to the sharks for the fun of it."

"Wasn't 'fun,' Mister Lewrie," Brainard sniffed. "Just business."

Chapter 3

Whampoa Reach was so densely crowded with shipping when they dropped the hook after a four-day voyage up the teeming Pearl River that they barely had room to swing. The river had narrowed from a wide estuary to a proper river at the Bogue after the first two days. The river pilot that guided them had gone hoarse cursing the sampans and junks full of fishermen, mendicants and permanently poor to get out of their way. And the closer they got to Canton, the more it seemed that the Pearl River had been cruelly inaptly named. It stank worse than the Old Fleet Ditch, the Hooghly or the Thames, bearing as it did the ordure and the garbage of untold millions of Chinese from its mountain birthplace to their anchorage.

There were ships of every nation there, crowded into the Reach as cheek-to-jowl as the thousands of native boats that made up floating suburbs, too poor to live on land. Dane and Dutch flags fluttered above vessels so beamy they looked like butter-tubs. There were Spanish and Portugese ships, Swedish ships, and a few merchantmen from Hamburg and the Baltic, even a pair of Prussians. There were British East Indiamen as lofty and trim as the stoutest "ocean bulldogs" of the Royal Navy, and country ships looking more rakish and piratical than something from a Defoe tale. There were Russian ships, even some Austrians, and lesser nations from the Mediterranean. And there were three or four racebuilt and over-sparred vessels, a little smaller than most, flying the new Stars and Stripes of the late Rebel Colonies, now graced by the name of the United States of America. And the French, huge merchantmen of the Compagnie des Indies, and their own country ships.

Whampoa Island, from September and the delivery of the first teas from inland, to the first of March when the Chinese would order them out and the Monsoon winds shifted to make faster passages home, would be a floating international city of its own below the distinctive island's pagodas and towers.

Alan Lewrie reckoned it would have to do for the next few weeks. With so many strictures on merchantmen as foreign-devil barbarians, there wouldn't be much in the way of recreation, except for the infamous Hog Lane ashore in the factory ghetto of Canton. Bumboats came alongside in a continual stream offering whores and gew-gaws, but no captain in his right mind would put his ship out of discipline in such an alien harbor, outnumbered as they were.

The hands eschewed these poorer offerings and waited their turn to visit Hog Lane, where they could swill and swive, no matter that the women would probably be peppered to their eyebrows with the pox. They heeded no warnings, and no captain could enforce celibacy without having a mutiny on his hands. The men had had enough of "boxing the Jesuit and getting cock-roaches," as they termed solitary stimulation.

There were other ships to visit, if one's idea of fun was going aboard another ship after spending up to six months aboard one already. Most provided what little entertainment they could, and Telesto was popular since she had bagpipers, the hand-bellows organ and some accomplished fiddlers and fifers to amuse her visitors, and her own hands. But even here, they were limited by the strictures of the host nation. Once at anchor, they had put out a ship's boat so the bosun could row about to see if the yards were squared away properly, and a mandarin's junk had been there in a twinkling, shouting pidgin orders against "boating for pleasure."

Alan suspected the mandarins got a cut from the many sampans that ruled the 'tween-ship traffic, who charged exorbitant fees to ferry foreign-devils about, their prices changing with no rhyme or reason, almost from one hour to the next.

The visiting back and forth would have made it easy to snoop and pry to find their suspected French privateers. Except that Alan wasn't allowed to. After their last encounter, he was pretty much in Twigg's bad-books again, and idled aboard ship most of the time. There was work to do, and he was made aware that he was, indeed, the fourth officer, the most junior, therefore the one most liable.

Twigg and his partner, Wythy, were thankfully out of his hair. They had gone ashore to take borrowed or rented "digs" at one of the established hongs in the factory-ghetto, doing arcane trading things, such as turning their lacs of silver into checques for safer transport, arranging the purchase of teas, silks, nankeens to be woven by hand from Indian cotton, and showing patterns for sets of china and lacquerware, and diagrams for the latest styles in furniture wanted back home in England so they could be manufactured in time for departure.