Ross King - Ex Libris

'Which was not entirely wrong, was it?' Biddulph gloomily observed. 'Because there then followed thirty years of the worst wars the world has ever known.'

For a moment we walked beside the river in silence. I was still trying to understand it all, to discover a coherent pattern among these bizarre activities, these strange, half-hidden events with their mysterious players-ones that, so far as I could see, bore little relation to what Alethea had told me about Henry Monboddo and The Labyrinth of the World .

Biddulph had now begun describing how, soon, another piece of news was delivered to the Navy Office by a panting courier. This had been in the late autumn of the year 1618, a short time after the comets appeared and Raleigh went to the scaffold specially built for him in Westminster Palace Yard. The report claimed that a Spanish galleon, the Sacra Familia , part of the Mexican fleet, had gone down with all hands near the Spanish port of Santiago de Cuba. That she sank was a fact, though the circumstances surrounding the affair were more mysterious. It was whispered in the Navy Office that the Sacra Familia had been boarded and then sunk by soldiers from the Philip Sidney . For the Sidney had not returned to London. It appeared that, like a few of the other ships in the fleet, she was prowling the Spanish Indies, as the defeated Drake had done in '96. But details were almost impossible to find, even in the Navy Office. Fact and fable were flung hopelessly together.

Soon another report arrived that the Philip Sidney had sunk in the Spanish Indies, followed swiftly by yet another claiming that the Philip Sidney had captured the Sacra Familia , then a third that the Sacra Familia had merely sunk in a violent storm. But one rumour in particular enjoyed a long career-long enough for it to pass from rumour into the more august realms of myth. It thrived for many years in the taverns of Tower Hill and Rotherhithe, or wherever mariners gathered. Like other of the rumours, it claimed that the Philip Sidney had chased the galleon and then, after firing her broadside guns, watched her sink with all hands. Yet this had been a galleon like no other.

'I know the rumour,' Biddulph said, 'because I must have heard it a dozen times. It concerns certain passengers on board the Sacra Familia . Stowaways, you might say. Ones that survived her wreck by clinging to the shards of her hull or else swimming ashore.'

'Who were they?' I was listening intently now. 'Spanish sailors?'

He shook his head. 'No, not Spanish sailors. Not sailors of any sort.' He chuckled to himself for a second before spurting a stream of tobacco juice into the grass. We had almost reached Wapping, and ahead of us a number of watermen were sunning themselves on the New Crane Stairs. 'Rats. That's what the crewmen of the Sidney watched swim ashore while the Sacra Familia sank. Hundreds of rats. The waters churned with them, and some even made their way aboard the Sidney . Oh, I know, what ship is not infested with rats? But these were not just any kind of rat, you must understand. None of the mariners had ever seen their like. They were twice the size of the rats on board the Philip Sidney . Great burly creatures, greyish-red in colour, with short legs and tails.' He paused for a second, chops twitching with an excited smile. 'In sum, Mr. Inchbold, these creatures were nothing other than bamboo rats.'

I had never heard of such things. 'I thought a rat was a rat.'

'Far from it. Jonston in his Natural History of Quadrupeds lists a good half-dozen types, including the rice rat and the cane rat. But this particular species, the bamboo rat, is unique in that it survives on a diet of bamboo shoots.'

'Bamboo? I wasn't aware that there was bamboo in Mexico.'

'Nor was I,' he replied. 'None has ever been sighted. Not anywhere in the Spanish Indies either.'

'So where did the rats come from if not Mexico or the Spanish Indies?'

He shrugged. 'Is it not obvious? They must have come aboard the Sacra Familia from somewhere that bamboo is found. And where is bamboo found but in the islands of the Pacific? In the Spice Islands, for instance. Jonston tells us that the bamboo rat is especially numerous in the Moluccas.'

'So the Sacra Familia had been to the Moluccas?'

'Or to an island elsewhere in the Pacific. Yes. What she was doing there is a conundrum, because Spanish voyages into the Pacific were rare in those years. Mendaña made his final voyage in search of the Solomon Islands in 1595, then Quirós and Tories followed in 1606. After that, though, there is almost nothing. The entire Pacific was fast becoming the domain of Spain's fiercest enemies, the Dutch, who had found a new passage into the South Seas through the Le Maire Strait. Many of the sea routes were now controlled by the ships of the Dutch East India Company.'

'So the Sacra Familia must have found another route,' I said eagerly, remembering the terms of Sir Ambrose's charter with its mission to discover a new passage to the South Seas. 'A route into the Pacific through the headwaters of the Orinoco.'

Biddulph shot me a surprised look. 'The idea has never occurred to me,' he replied, shaking his head. 'Nor was it mentioned in the rumours. Still, I must own that it's an interesting notion. But whatever she might have discovered, or however she might have reached it, the Sacra Familia had sailed in the Pacific, that much seems certain. Only now she was disguised as part of the Mexican treasure fleet. Her travels must have been a great secret, because when she was attacked by the Sidney her crew jettisoned all of her charts and portolanos, the ship's chronicle, the captain's log-everything that might have betrayed her mission. They got rid of everything, I should say, except her smell.'

That was the last and perhaps the most curious part of the story. For the Sacra Familia had possessed, even from the distance, a remarkable smell. It was not the usual smell of a ship at sea-the stink of rotting provisions, of bilgewater, of damp wood and gunpowder, of chamber-pots overturned by storms. On the contrary, it was a beautiful smell that seemed to float across the water towards the Philip Sidney , a delicious scent that reminded the mariners of incense or perfume. It seemed to hang over the water for hours after the burning wreck finally disappeared under the water. The bewitching scent was not, the rumours insisted, that of the cargo-some cargo that might have been loaded in the Moluccas-but of the ship herself, as if the aroma emanated in some mysterious way from her beams and masts.

'I never knew what to make of the stories, of either the rats or the beautiful smell. Only that, if the tales were true, the Sacra Familia was plainly not what she seemed.'

Yes, I thought, intrigued: her voyage was as mysterious as that of the Philip Sidney , to whom her fate was somehow bonded.

'So sorry, Mr. Inchbold,' he said with a gentle smile as he creaked open the door to his house. 'I fear I can tell you no more. Rumour and gossip, that is all I was ever to learn of the episode.'

We stepped back inside the little house, where I was treated to another cup of rumbullion. For the next hour I listened to other theories that Biddulph's leisure allowed him to concoct, including the 'dark matter' (as he called it) of Buckingham's murder in 1628, an act carried out not by a half-mad Puritan fanatic, as history recorded, but by an agent of Cardinal Richelieu cleverly disguised as a half-mad Puritan fanatic. But I was barely listening to Biddulph now. I was thinking instead of how it seemed that Sir Ambrose had once again sailed over the horizon and-for me at least-eluded configuration. I was also remembering the mysterious 1600 edition of Ortelius's Theatrum orbis terrarum , along with the patents in Alethea's muniment room, and thinking of how Sir Ambrose had been in Prague in the year 1620, two years and 6,000 miles from his mysterious adventures in the Spanish Indies. So I wondered if there was some deeper connection between these two doomed ventures, some invisible history that might involve the lost Hermetic text that Henry Monboddo and his mysterious client so desperately desired. Or was I merely becoming infected by Biddulph's curious line of logic in which no two events, however far apart in time or space, were ever unrelated?