David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

‘One doesn’t doubt,’ says the Captain, ‘Fischer was told what was expedient.’ Penhaligon slits open the envelope containing the letter from the doctor. He is expecting Dutch, but finds neatly written English. ‘There is a capable linguist ashore. “To Captain Penhaligon of the Royal Navy: Sir, I, Jacob de Zoet, elected on this day President of the Provisional Dejima Republic -” ’

‘A “Republic”!’ Wren snorts. ‘That walled-in hamlet of warehouses?’

‘ “- beg to inform you that we, the undersigned, reject the Kew Memorandum; oppose your goal of illegitimately seizing Dutch trading interests in Nagasaki; reject your bait of gain under the English East India Company; demand the return of Chief Resident van Cleef; and inform Mr Peter Fischer of Brunswick that he is henceforth exiled from our territory.” ’

The four officers look at ex-Envoy Fischer, who swallows and asks for a translation.

‘To continue: “Howsoever Messrs Snitker, Fischer et al assure you otherwise, yesterday’s kidnappings are seen by Japan’s authorities as a breach of sovereignty. Swift retaliation is to be expected, which I am powerless to prevent. Consider not only your ship’s company, innocents in these machinations of states, but also their wives, parents and children. One appreciates that a captain of the Royal Navy has orders to follow, but à l’impossible nul n’est tenu. Your respectful servant, Jacob de Zoet.” It is signed by all the Dutchmen.’

Laughter, rakish and rookish, fills the wardroom below.

‘Pray share the bones of the matter with Fischer, Mr Hovell.’

As Hovell translates the letter into Dutch, Major Cutlip lights his pipe. ‘Why did this Marinus feed our Prussian all that donkey manure?’

‘To cast him,’ sighs Penhaligon, ‘in the role of a prize jackass.’

‘What was that frog-croak,’ asks Wren, ‘at the end of the letter, sir?’

Talbot clears his throat. ‘ “No one is bound to do the impossible.” ’

‘How I hate a man,’ says Wren, ‘who farts in French and expects applause.’

‘And what is this -’ Cutlip snorts ‘- “Republic” buffoonery about?’

‘Morale. Fellow-citizens make braver fighters than jumpy underlings. This de Zoet is not the fool that Fischer would have us believe.’

The Prussian is subjecting Hovell to a volley of outraged denials. ‘He claims, Captain, that de Zoet and Marinus cooked up the mischief between them – that the signatures must be forged. He says that Gerritszoon and Baert can’t even write.’

‘Hence they inked in their thumbprints!’ Penhaligon resists an urge to hurl his whale’s-tooth paperweight at Fischer’s pasty, sweaty, desperate face. ‘Show him, Hovell! Show him the thumbprints! Thumbprints, Fischer! Thumbprints!’

Timbers creak, men snore, rats chew, lamps hiss. Sitting at the fold-down desk in the lamp-lit wooden womb of his sleeping cabin, Penhaligon scratches an itch between the knuckles of his left hand and listens to the twelve sentries relaying the message ‘Three bells, all well,’ around the bulwarks. No, it is not, by damn, thinks the Captain. Two blank sheets of paper are waiting to be turned into letters: one to Mr – never, he thinks, ‘President’ – Jacob de Zoet of Dejima, and the other to His August Personage, Magistrate Shiroyama of Nagasaki. The uninspired correspondent scratches his scalp, but dandruff and lice, not words, fall on to the blotter.

A wait of sixty days, he tips the detritus into the lamp, may be justifiable…

Crossing the China Sea in December, Wetz worried, would be a battering voyage.

… but to surrender our gunpowder would see me court-martialled.

A cockchafer twitches its twin whiskers in the shadow of his inkwell.

He looks at the old man in his shaving mirror and reads an imaginary article buried deep in the next year’s The Times of London.

‘John Penhaligon, former captain of HM Frigate Phoebus, returned from the first British mission to Japan since the reign of James I. He was relieved of his post and retired without pension, having achieved no military, commercial or diplomatic success.’

‘It’ll be the Impressment Service for you,’ warns his reflection, ‘braving outraged mobs in Bristol and Liverpool. There are too many Hovells and Wrens waiting in the wings…’

Damn the Dutch eyes, thinks the Englishman, of Jacob de Zoet…

Penhaligon decrees that the cockchafer has no right to exist.

… and damn his cheese-weaned health, damn his mastery of my language.

The cockchafer escapes the Homo sapiens’ slammed fist.

A disturbance breaks out in his guts; no quarter shall be given.

I must brave the fangs in my foot, Penhaligon realises, or shit my breeches.

The pain, as he drags himself into the next-door privy, is excruciating…

… and in the black nook, he unbuttons himself and flops on the seat.

My foot, the torture ebbs and flows, is becoming a calcified potato.

The agonising ten-pace journey, however, has quelled his bowels.

Master of a frigate, he ponders, but not of his own intestines.

Wavelets lap and nudge the hull, twenty feet below.

Young women, they hide, he hums his shitty ditty, like birds in the bushes…

Penhaligon twists the wedding ring, embedded in middle-aged plumpness.

Young women, they hide, like birds in the bushes…

Meredith died only three years ago, but his memory of her face is eroded.

… and were I but a young man I’d go bang them bushes…

Penhaligon wishes he had paid that portraitist his fifteen pounds…

To my right fol-diddle-dero, to my right fol-diddle-dee.

… but there were his brother’s debts to settle, and his own pay was late, again.

He scratches a fiery itch between the knuckles of his left hand.

A familiar acidity burns his sphincter. Haemorrhoids, he thinks, as well?

‘No time for self-pity,’ he tells himself. ‘Letters of state must be written.’

The Captain listens to the sentries call out, ‘Five bells, all well…’ The oil in the lamp is low, but replenishing it will wake his gout, and he is too embarrassed to call Chigwin for so simple a task. His indecision is recorded on the blank sheets of paper. He summons his thoughts but they scatter like sheep. Every great captain or admiral, he considers, possesses a celebratory toponym: Nelson has the Nile; Rodney has Martinique et al; Jervis has Cape St Vincent. ‘So why mayn’t John Penhaligon have Nagasaki?’ One Dutch clerk named Jacob de Zoet, he thinks, is why; damn the wind that blew him this way…

The warning in de Zoet’s letter, the Captain concedes, was a masterstroke.

He watches a teardrop of ink fall from his quill back into the bottle.

To heed the warning would place me in his debt.

Unexpected rain smatters the sea and spatters the deck.

But to ignore the warning could prove reckless…

Wetz has the larboard watch tonight: he orders out the awnings and barrels to catch the rain.

… and lead not to an Anglo-Japanese Accord but an Anglo-Japanese War.

He thinks of Hovell’s scenario of Siamese traders in the Bristol Channel.

Sixty days would be required for Parliament to send an answer, yes.

Penhaligon has rubbed a mosquito bite on his knuckle into an angry lump.

He looks into his shaving mirror: his grandfather looks back.

There are ‘known foreigners’, Penhaligon thinks, and ‘foreign foreigners’.

Against the French, Spaniards or Dutch, one buys intelligence from spies.

The lamp spits, falters and snuffs out. The cabin is hooded by night.

De Zoet, he sees, has deployed one of his best weapons.

‘A short sleep,’ the Captain advises himself, ‘may dispel the fog…’