Annie Proulx - Barkskins

The jolting coach nearly liquefied their livers and Duquet chose to get out and run alongside the equipage at every chance. In Paris they found an inn near the street of wigmakers and tailors.

The next sunrise brought one of those blue and spicy days when the wind cleared away noisome odors. It was a fine day for walking and Duquet and Toppunt strode through the streets. Toppunt pointed out a popular coffee shop. They went in and Duquet decided to risk the coffee again. Toppunt smacked his lips over the sugared chocolate and declared it delicious. Despite the tarry flavor of the coffee, Duquet once again felt charged with energy and sharp-minded. Toppunt said that was one of the many virtues of the dark fluid.

“It is good for ailments as well,” said the grey-headed coffeehouse server, joining their conversation. “It is the favored drink of merchants and businessmen as it allows them to do great sums in their heads and to work long hours.”

• • •

At the tailor’s shop Duquet selected blue velvet for his coat and accepted the idea of a pair of culottes cut on the bias. The obsequious tailor suggested a fine English cloth, remarking that this fabric was very much preferred. But Duquet chose a striped blue satin, though he couldn’t resist the man’s suggestion to visit the boot maker next door for a pair of the delicate shoes with rounded toes just coming into vogue.

The wigmaker, his hands shaking with some ague-like affliction or a surfeit of coffee, urged the latest style, smaller, flatter on top and with “pigeon wings” rippling back over the temples, instead of the full-bottomed wigs both men wanted. He stressed greater comfort and ease. Toppunt said yes, but Duquet, his ideas of what a wealthy man looked like set, insisted on the great wig with its expensive mass of curls and frizz.

“Ready when you return, my dear, dear sirs, but only,” said the man, “if you pay now, as shipwrecks, pirates, plague and scurvy are not unknown among those who travel to the Far Eastern lands. If you perish, your survivors may call for the hair.”

They endured an even more unpleasant journey back to La Rochelle; one of the coach horses fell dead in the traces and then the axle broke on a rough detour. They hired saddle horses and rode more comfortably, but reached the ship with only hours to spare before she sailed. Captain Verdwijnen was in a foul temper and accused Toppunt of neglecting his duty.

“That will be a black mark against you, sir,” he said. “You will hear the result of my displeasure shortly.” What Toppunt’s punishment was Duquet did not know, but he noticed the captain constantly found fault with all the mate did.

• • •

So the ship departed, down the Channel, past Brest, past Portugal, then west, well out to sea to avoid Africa’s bulge and the Doldrums, down, down through a zone of variable winds until Captain Verdwijnen claimed he could smell Brazil, then swinging southeast for the Cape of Good Hope, keeping well away from the Agulhas Current, and on, ever eastward, until they picked up the southwest monsoon in season that would carry them to the treacherous Sunda Strait and on to China.

Duquet had no love for the sea. Rivers were the thing, ever-changing, muscular waterways that challenged one to decipher their linear characters. In comparison the ocean was a tiresome medium of waves that broke and swelled, sometimes lost their shapes and separated into confusion. Storms and throbbing rollers he endured, and hoped never to see a towering rogue wave as the sailors described, never to hear the awful moaning of a cyclone wind.

• • •

Captain Verdwijnen kept a Spartan table and dined alone in his cabin on boiled pork, beer, bread and cheese. At the officers’ table, often augmented with fresh-caught dolphin or octopus soup, the dinner talk was conducted in a variety of languages and pointing at the bread or wine was more useful than asking for it. Duquet could understand how Captain Verdwijnen had come to wave his arms and twitch his face in universal sign language. The cook, Li Wen, was Chinese, on his way back to China, said Captain Verdwijnen, after years of study in Amsterdam.

“What did he study?” asked Duquet, suddenly interested.

“Dutch medicine, I believe. He is somewhat important in China, but frugal enough to work his passage by acting as cook.”

“So he is a physician?”

“For this voyage he is a surgeon, a master of head injuries. And he is the cook.”

“But beyond the voyage is he a physician in China?”

“He is a coroner.”

“What is that, a coroner?”

“It is a skilled man who understands the signs of death and who examines bodies to say if they have been the victims of foul play or natural causes. I would rather have him attend me than most ships’ doctors, a group given over to drink and devious actions. Coroner is an important profession in China, where jealousies and rivalries are the equal of any at the French court. And one may purchase venoms at numerous shops.”

Duquet cornered the coroner and said in his broken Dutch that he would like to learn at least a few phrases of the Chinese language. He showed a coin but Li Wen looked horrified. He expostulated in fluent French.

“Not possible. Chinese government not allow foreigners learn Chinese. Forbidden.” Li Wen then recited Chinese poems, translated and explained them to Duquet. There was, he said, no law against declaiming Chinese poetry. Duquet immediately saw himself as the powerful animal in Zhang Ji’s poem of a tiger prowling mountain forests, so frightful that an entire village stood rigid, staring at the sight of his tracks. So, too, Duquet thought, he would claim whole forests.

• • •

One evening over their postprandial glass, Captain Verdwijnen looked slyly at Duquet and told him that in Guangzhou — Canton — he could order a set of ivory teeth to be carved that would fit his jaws and give him the appearance of a handsome rogue. The work could be done by the very same carver who fashioned dildos for sailors’ wives. The carver, he said, was expensive but worth it. And, raising his hands as if in discovery, he said the Hong businessman who acted as his assigned merchant could arrange this and would likely be interested in Duquet’s furs. He stroked an especially fine lynx pelt that Duquet had brought into his quarters.

“This was intended as a gift to the emperor of China, but I give it to you.” Duquet pressed it into Captain Verdwijnen’s hands, adding that perhaps his wife would like it as company for the ivory implement.

“Ha ha,” said Captain Verdwijnen, uncorking another jenever bottle with his teeth. “Just as well. No foreigner has ever gained an audience with the emperor of China.”

• • •

It was late October when they and the ships that had kept them company entered the China Sea. The weather had been unusually fine down the west coast of Africa, but then the monsoon winds became dying and fitful. They stopped briefly at the Cape of Good Hope but did not linger as the VOC had a station there with men watching out for independent entrepreneurs. The wind was increasingly unreliable on the east coast. Four stormy days, the sky shuddering, the sea choking on itself, impressed Duquet as very violent, but he was alone in that opinion. Twice threatening sails came over the horizon. Captain Verdwijnen said they were pirates, for through the spyglass he could make out their sinister flags. Duquet asked innocently when the pirate-warning mastiff would climb into the rigging, and only caught on when he heard the crew’s smothered laughter.

Listening to the table talk Duquet conjured up a picture of the oceans of the world dotted with ships suspended somehow in fog loom, all unconscious that other ships were near. Those ships carried cargoes of everything in the world.