The King

'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.

Their cargo of opium, the officers were informed in the captain's quarters, had fetched over eighty thousand pounds sterling above what they'd had to pay out to customs officials and mandarins as bribes. Which sum made every officer lift his eyebrows and make small, speculative, humming noises. 'Hmmm, damn profitable work, for Navy-work, hmmm?' Made them wonder just what percentage would be Droits of the Crown, what part Droits of the Admiralty, and what precedent there would be about shares after the expense of the voyage was subtracted. In peacetime, there was no prize-money for fighting and taking a ship in combat, and there never was much profit in taking a privateer, which was why they flourished so easily. Made them wonder if anyone from the Crown would mind if they laid a few thousand guineas aside… 'for contingencies'… and never reported it. Never reported any profit at all, perhaps, and pocketed the sum entire…?

Lewrie finally got shore leave after a couple of weeks. In company with McTaggart again, he went over the side and took his ease in a large bumboat, a scow or barge practically as wide as it was long, for the twelve-mile row to Canton. They were ensconsed in capacious chairs on the upper deck, while seamen had to idle on the lower deck in a herd of expectant and recently paid humanity. They sampled mao tai brandy and lolled indolent as mandarins, though the fussy, and Presbyterian, McTaggart had some qualms about being too comfortable in this life.

They wafted up the narrowing river between the mainland and Honam Island, a faerie-land of willows, delicate bridges, parks and ponds, where the Joss House was, and the homes of some of the richest Chinese merchants of the Co Hong. But Honam Island, to larboard, was not their destination. They were landed at Jack Ass Point, next to one of the customs houses. The sailors from several ships gave a great cheer and dashed to the right of the huge square for Hog Lane, leaving McTaggart and Lewrie to descend and alight.

'There's mair commerce in this ain place than the Pool of London!' McTaggart exclaimed as they goggled at the piles and piles of goods, the hordes of coolies fetching and toting and the sampans being loaded and unloaded. On the far side of the square, there was a long row of factories, broken only by Hog Lane, China Street and a creek. On the other side of the factories, or hongs, there was a wide boulevard, and the Consoo House, the headquarters of the Yeung Hong Sheung, better known as the Co Hong, and a matching row of old and delapidated minor hongs of Chinese merchants, there on sufferance from the Co Hong. The whole thing was walled in from the rest of the city to prevent the natives from being disturbed or corrupted by the barbarian traders.