The Barbary Pirates

because he doesn’t worry too much about truth or principle. In other words, I knew the type and recognized his usefulness. “This Dragut looks like just the rascal we need,” I told the others.

“Trustworthy?”

“Expedient.”

We boarded, coins were counted out, and Dragut’s men sprang to quietly raise anchor and sails. The crew hauled on the lines in the dark with the surety that comes from long practice. None objected to our sudden nighttime departure, once they saw money. Even as the pursuing gondolas hunted along the shore, we drifted from Venice before first light blushed in the east, not daring to set a lantern. The water hissed under our keel, a dawn breeze carrying the smell of the city, and then the sails stretched as the wind freshened, rigging creaking. The boat leaned, came alive, and settled into rhythm. The city’s lamps began to fade behind us, disappearing with the last of the stars.

We collapsed into sleep.

I awoke at midmorning and inspected the craft we’d hired. Our xebec had two main masts and a mizzen, lateen sails, a dozen light cannon to ward off thieves, and a high, graceful poop we savants could relax on while the half-dozen Muslims worked the ship. There was a simple cabin below that Hamidou said we could share with him but which was too low to stand in. His crew slept on the open deck, and below a main-deck grating was the hold for sails, supplies, and cargo. Long, narrow, and shallow-drafted, it was ideal for poking in and out of the tight harbors of the Mediterranean.

The city had disappeared, and we were alone on the sparkling Adriatic. “Good morning!” Hamidou greeted. “I will get you to Thira two days faster than any captain in Venice!”

We ate a breakfast of couscous and lamb—the crew’s leftovers from the night before—and took stock. The nice thing about a scrape with danger, I decided, was that we four savants had developed the fellowship of shared peril. We had the exhilaration that comes from escape, and the camaraderie that comes from relying on each other for our lives.

I, with my rifle, tomahawk, and sword, was considered the veteran. I’d been in battles, and this granted me an assumption of competence and courage. It’s why men work hard to become dangerous.

Smith, cheerful at this opportunity to see more of the world than the bottom of a canal ditch, took an avid interest in the working of the Islamic ship and a dedication to cleaning his blunderbuss. He fired it once for the sailors, the kick punching him backward, and its roar made them jump and cry in wonder and delight. The bullets kicked up a spray on the sea.

Fulton had sewn a patch on his wounded bag and was fitting metal tubes to extend the pipes, half filling the bag with seawater and squirting it at Cuvier in a spray he adjusted by tinkering with the nozzle.

“You’re constructing a fountain?” the Frenchman asked.

“I’m making a dragon. I need to find some oil on Thira.”

Cuvier, when not recording expenses and compass readings in his journal, proudly showed his new pistols to Hamidou Dragut. The pair had a fine time with mock duels, pacing the length of the xebec before turning and firing with clicks of hammers, like boys.

“These pistols are as pretty as a houri!” our captain exclaimed. “This is good, because death should be elegant. I would be kissed by weapons like these, or the American’s pretty sword, and bleed happily. You are gentlemen of taste and refinement.”

The truth was that we felt cheerful. There’s thrill in cheating danger. We were swashbucklers, out for scientific fame. Bonaparte’s required journey was a diversion to a Mediterranean where all colors are brighter, all meals slower, all evenings more languid, all women more mysterious, and all cities more ancient. The wind was warm, and the limoncello liqueur we bought was ambrosia from the islands, sweet and sharp as honeyed ice.

For me, the conversation with Napoleon about his Little Red Man had ignited a hundred memories and unanswered questions. I remembered Bonaparte’s bold stay alone in the granite sarcophagus of the Great Pyramid, lying like a dead man and emerging from its dark chamber with hallucinatory visions. I’d been embroiled in a deepening puzzle ever since—first the medallion and the pyramid, and then the Book of Thoth in the tunnels of Jerusalem and the City of Ghosts. Magnus Bloodhammer had dragged Norse myth and North America into the tangle, and all this musty legend pointed to some ancient beginnings forged by strange god-men with powerful knowledge, long forgotten and only half rediscovered. There were secrets that had been anxiously sought by conquerors from Alexander to the Crusaders, and a weird, dark history that interwove with our more conventional one. Each time I thought the mystery had finally slammed shut, another door would open. Each time I thought the Egyptian Rite was out of my life, it would unexpectedly reappear. Each time I thought I’d fought or tunneled my way to some final conclusion, yet another quest became necessary. It was dangerous as the devil, and I grieved for the friends I’d lost along the way, but it was also as intoxicating as a temptress or a chest of gold. I was becoming the master, I realized, not of electricity as my mentor Franklin might have hoped, nor commerce as my father desired, nor even war as Napoleon might instruct, but of a story with snakelike twists that hinted where we’d come from. It led back into the fog when time began. While Smith and Cuvier looked to rocks for the answer, I was the scientist of myth, the investigator of the improbable. Fate had woven me a career out of fable.

Dragut was curious, of course, why four European scholars (I benefitted from their company by being lumped with them) would want to coast round the Peloponnese of Greece and fetch up at a rocky island on the rim of the Aegean. Thira had no city, no commerce, and no ancient ruins of any note. “They are poor and pious, on an island the devil made,” he said. “It is one of those places in the Mediterranean where nothing is.”

“We study the history of the earth,” Smith told him. “Thira is dramatic.”

He shrugged. “I allow it is steep. But what need of history?”

“Men learn from the past.”

“Men are slaves to the past, always trying to correct old errors. Trust in Allah, my friend.”

“I trust you to sail this ship safely to where we want to go.”

“Yes! Put your faith in Hamidou, too! I will surprise you!”

We caught a northwesterly maestro wind off the continent and surfed down the windy Adriatic, quickly passing the Austrian possessions of Dalmatia and then, as the breeze fell, coasting by Croatia, tiny Montenegro, and the western coast of Greece that was controlled by the Ottoman Empire. The wind gradually gentled, the sea a saucer of sparkle. Castles crowned rocky headlands, pastel villages lined aquamarine bays, and bulbous church steeples served as navigation marks between reefs and islets. The blue of sea and sky deepened as we sailed south, clouds sweet as cream.

The seven Greek islands of the new Septinsular Republic, created when the Russians and Turks ejected French troops three years before, slid by like high green jewels: Corfu, Kefalonia, Ithaca. It was one of the leaders of this tiny experiment, charismatic Count Ioannis Kapodistrias, whom we were to secretly meet on Thira. There was cloud at the summit of Kefalonia’s Mount Ainos as we breezed by, and I could smell the pine from its shore. It beckoned like a green paradise, but we had no time to tarry. We were going to a place dry and largely treeless, and more like Creation when the world began.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Thira, that Greek island that the Venetians call Santorini, rises sheer from the blue Aegean like a wall of jagged chocolate, its volcanic cliffs topped by whitewashed villages that cling to the crest like frosting. Thira is actually an archipelago of half a dozen islands, the broken remnants of an ancient crater. We sailed into its caldera drunk from wind and the dazzling sunlight of the Aegean, all colors brighter, all edges sharper, the babble of our sailors foreign, our mission misty, and my scientific companions as anticipatory as if they were on holiday. We were in legendary Greece, cradle of democracy, edge of the Ottoman Empire, in a place that looked as if it was created yesterday and could be remade by an explosion tomorrow. Our destination island was a crescent that enclosed a seemingly bottomless bay four miles wide by six long. Across this bay was the smaller island of Thirassia that represented, Smith told me, the opposite side of the old crater wall. In the harbor’s center was a small, low, rumpled island as pocked as the moon. It was smoking.