1642: Abel Mallard’s Journal
Anchored near Dover
I sometimes think that were the world a single pearl, some fool in a coronet would order me to fetch it. The command came last month—sealed in wax, perfumed with ducal impatience—to convey the treasure of the Empire to the coast of England before midsummer. The letter specified what it prettily called mixed cargo. It is indeed mixed, much in the way a thunderstorm is mixed: a little light, a scattering of thunder, and enough brilliance to ruin a man’s sleep for good.
The hold now groans with it, creaking like an elderly dragon adjusting its bones. Jewels by the chest—emeralds square as cathedral windows, rubies that might heat a chapel by their own embarrassment. Fabrics folded tighter than the lies of merchants: silks, muslins, gauzes, and a Persian weave that behaves as if woven from the sighs of disappointed angels. We took on spices too, the scent of which now rules the deck—cinnamon, pepper, mace—so that every breath feels like Christmas in Hell. One sneeze from the bosun could bankrupt a colony.
Gold weighs most heavily, not because of mass but because it keeps remembering duty. Each bar demands to know its destination. “The Crown,” I tell them, “through the Mallard coffers.” And they glitter reproachfully, as though aware how I’d rather leave them lounging in those aristocratic vaults than see them melt into cannon metal for another of the King’s historical paralyses. But I am a loyal man—or at least, I am convincingly shaped like one.
The humans are a different weight altogether. Sixteen of them, men chosen for the ducal seraglio—though it is none of my affair what functions of delight the Duke assigns. Fine creatures, all elegance and contraband good humour. I dine with them, sometimes, to reassure them that their captivity is at worst administrative. They sing after supper in languages I cannot trace to any map. Their laughter moves about the deck like sunlight on water. A captain could come to envy his own cargo.
Among the curiosities: a carved throne from Abyssinia, which shudders when lightning’s near; a mirror from Goa that reflects one’s face slightly improved, and therefore untrustworthy; dried fruit that speaks quietly of lands that never existed; a bale of letters intercepted from the Spanish—intelligence, they call it, though I’ve met cleverer barnacles. Also news, raw and fluttering: that the Dutch are dreaming up trade routes faster than the Crown can spell them, that the French are practicing peace as an athletic spectacle, and that the economy (whatever invisible monster that may be) is said to be thriving malevolently.
All of it piles up into a singular delirium of possession. When I walk through the lower deck by lamplight it seems less like cargo than confession—the empire whispering to itself about what it really wants. As one of my officers wrote in The Book of Mariners’ Folly, “All treasure is the skeleton of desire.” I feel that in my bones, though in fairness I may simply be getting older. For what is piracy, after all, but administration performed without paperwork?
Yet there’s beauty in it too, a queer holiness. The air down there is perfumed chaos—musk, salt, gold, men’s sweat, cardamom, fear. I sometimes dip my hand into a chest at random just to feel the world’s pulse—bangles, jade, sugar crystals, coins still warm from other hands. The ship seems to purr under such attention. She knows she is carrying magnificence, and magnificence knows she is carrying it only provisionally.
I write this while anchored beneath an ordinary English sky—pale, offended, wholly inadequate to the cargo below. I imagine the dragon asleep in the hold, dreaming of empire and counting it backwards. How easily a man could vanish into such abundance; how easily a nation could mistake itself for the hoard it carries. But let that be philosophy for calmer weather.
Tomorrow the tide turns, and we sail to deliver our monstrous splendour to the Mallard vaults—where it will glitter unseen beneath a house that leaks in every other respect. After that, it becomes the King’s, or rather, the King’s accountant’s. But tonight, here between wind and whisper, I claim it all privately in my heart, as an honest thief should: the jewels, the silks, the laughter, the impossible cargo of worlds.
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