“Elders?”

“The dog was older than the Earl-come on, pay attention!” Pepys said, giving Daniel a tremendous frown.

“Strikes me as an unwise thing to have said,” Daniel muttered.

“The King said, ‘No, no, Upnor has always been a civil fellow,’ or some such, and so there was no duel.”

“Still, Upnor strikes me as a grudge-holder-”

“Enoch has sent better men than Upnor to Hell-don’t trouble yourself about his future,” Wilkins said. “You need to tend to your own faults, young fellow-excessive sobriety, e.g…”

“A tendency to fret-” Pepys put in.

“Undue chastity-let’s back to the tavern!”

HE WOKE UP SOMETIME THEnext day on a hired coach bound for Cambridge-sharing a confined space with Isaac Newton, and a load of gear that Isaac had bought in London: a six-volume set of Theatrum Chemicum,*numerous small crates stuffed with straw, the long snouts of retorts poking out-canisters of stuff that smelled odd. Isaac was saying, “If you throw up again, please aim for this bowl-I’m collecting bile.”

Daniel was able to satisfy him there.

“Where Enoch the Red failed, you’re going to succeed-?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Going after the Philosophic Mercury, Isaac?”

“What else is there to do?”

“The R.S. adores your telescope,” Daniel said. “Oldenburg wants you to write more on the subject.”

“Mmm,” Isaac said, lost in thought, comparing passages in three different books to one another. “Could you hold this for a moment, please?” Which was how Daniel came to be a human book-rest for Isaac. Not that he was in any condition to accomplish greater things. In his lap for the next hour was a tome: folio-sized, four inches thick, bound in gold and silver, obviously made centuries before Gutenberg. Daniel was going to blurt, This must have been fantastically expensive, but on closer investigation found a book-plate pasted into it, bearing the arms of Upnor, and a note from the Earl:

Mr. Newton-

May this volume become as treasured by you, as the memory of our fortuitous meeting is to me-

WHEN THEY’VE MADEit out of Plymouth and into Cape Cod Bay, van Hoek returns to his cabin and becomes Captain once more. He looks rather put out to find the place so discomposed. Perhaps this is a sign of Daniel’s being a bitter old Atheistical crank, but he nearly laughs out loud. Minerva ’s a collection of splinters loosely pulled together by nails, pegs, lashings, and oakum, not even large enough to count as a mote in the eye of the world-more like one of those microscopic eggs that Hooke discovered with his microscope. She floats only because boys mind her pumps all the time, she remains upright and intact only because highly intelligent men never stop watching the sky and seas around her. Every line and sail decays with visible speed, like snow in sunlight, and men must work ceaselessly worming, parceling, serving, tarring, and splicing her infinite net-work of hempen lines in order to prevent her from falling apart in mid-ocean with what Daniel imagines would be explosive suddenness. Like a snake changing skins, she sloughs away what is worn and broken and replaces it from inner reserves-evoluting as she goes. The only way to sustain this perpetual and necessary evolution is to replenish the stocks that dwindle from her holds as relentlessly as sea-water leaks in. The only way to do that is to trade goods from one port to another, making a bit of money on each leg of the perpetual voyage. Each day assails her with hurricanes and pirate-fleets. To go out on the sea and find a Minerva is like finding, in the desert, a Great Pyramid blanced upside-down on its tip. She’s a baby in a basket-a book in a bonfire. And yet van Hoek has the temerity to appoint his cabin as if it were a gentleman’s drawing-room, with delicate weather-glasses, clocks, optickal devices, a decent library, a painting or two, an enamel cabinet stocked with Chinese crockery, a respectable stock of brandy and port. He’s got mirrors in here, for Christ’s sake. Not only that, but when he enters to discover a bit of broken glass on the deck, and small impact-craters here and there, he becomes so outraged that Dappa doesn’t need to tell Daniel they’d best leave him alone for a while.

“So the curtain has come down on your performance. Now, a man in your position might feel like a barnacle-unable to leave the ship-an annoyance to mariners-but on Minerva there is a job for everyone,” says Dappa, leading him down the midships staircase to the gundeck.

Daniel’s not paying attention. A momentous rearrangement has taken place since Daniel was last here. All of the obstructions that formerly cluttered the space have been moved elsewhere or thrown overboard to create rights-of-way for the cannons. These had been lashed up against the inside of the hull, but now they’ve been swung round ninety degrees and each aimed at its gunport. As they are maneuvering on Cape Cod Bay, miles from the nearest Foe, those gunports are all closed for now. But like stage-hands laboring in the back of a theatre, the seamen are hard at work with diverse arcane tools, viz. lin-stocks, quoins, gunner’s picks, and worming-irons. One man’s got what looks like a large magnifying-glass, except without the glass-it’s an empty circle of iron on a handle. He sits astride a crate of cannonballs, heaving them out one at a time and passing them through the ring to gauge them, sorting them into other crates. Others whittle and file round blocks of wood, called sabots, and strap cannonballs to them. But anyone carrying a steel blade is distinctly unwelcome near the powder-barrels, because steel makes sparks.

One sailor, an Irishman, is talking to one of the Plymouth whaleboat pirates captured this morning. A cannon is between the two men, and when a cannon is between two men, that is what they talk about. “This is Wapping Wendy, or W.W., or dub-dub as we sometimes dub her in the heat of battle, though you may call her ‘darling’ or ‘love of my life’ but never ‘Wayward Wendy’ as that lot-” glowering at the crew of another gun, “Mr. Foote,” “-like to defame her.”

“Is she? Wayward?”

“She’s like any other lass, you must get to know her, and then what might seem inconstant is clearly revealed as a kind of consistency-faithfulness even. And so the first thing you must know about our darling girl is that her bore tends up and to larboard of her centerline. And she’s a tight one, is our virginal Wendy, which is why we on the dub-dub crew must keep a sharp eye for undersized balls and husband ’em carefully…”

Someone on the crew of “Manila Surprise” nudges that gun’s port open for a moment, and sun shines in. But Manila Surprise is on the larboard side of the ship. “We are sailing southwards!?” Daniel exclaims.

“No better way to run before a north wind,” Dappa says.

“But in that direction, Cape Cod is only a few miles away! What sort of an escape route is that?”

“As you have reckoned, we shall have to work to windwards eventually in order to escape from Cape Cod Bay,” Dappa says agreeably. “When we do, Teach’s fleet will be tacking along with us. But his ships are fore-and-aft rigged and can sail closer to the wind, and make better headway, than our dear Minerva, a square-rigger. Advantage Teach.”

“Shouldn’t we head north while we can, then?”

“He would catch us in a matter of minutes-his entire fleet together, working in concert. We want to fight Teach’s ships one at a time if we can. So southwards it is, for now. Running before the wind in full sail, we are faster than they. So Teach knows that if he pursues us to the south we may lose him. But he also knows that we must wheel about and work northwards before long-so he will spread out a sort of picket-line and wait for us.”