The men throw their weapons into lockers and ascend into the rigging, pursuant to commands from van Hoek, who’s up on the poop deck bellowing into a shiny trumpet of hammered brass. There are plenty of men belowdecks who could be making contributions here, but they don’t come up. Daniel, beginning to get the hang of pirate-fighting, understands that van Hoek wants to hide the true size of his crew from Teach.
They have been running before a north wind (though it seems to’ve shifted a few points westwards) for over an hour. The southern limb of Cape Cod is dead ahead, barring their path. But long before reaching the shore, Minerva would run aground in coarse brown sand. So they have to come about now and begin to work to windward, towards the open Atlantic. These simple terms-“come about,” for example-denote procedures that are as complicated and tradition-bound as the installation of a new Pope. Great big strong men are running toward the bow: the foreyard loosers and furlers, and the headsail loosers and stowers. They take up positions on the forecastledeck or shinny out onto the bowsprit, but politely step aside for the wiry foretopmen who begin their laborious ascent up the fore shrouds to work the topsails and things higher up the foremast. It is a bristling and tangled thicket of nautical detail. Like watching fifty surgeons dissect fifty different animals at once-the kind of stuff that, half a century ago, would’ve fascinated Daniel, sucked him into this sort of life, made him a sea-captain. But like a captain reefing and striking his sails before too strong a wind, lest it drive his ship onto the shallows, Daniel ignores as much of this as he can get away with, and tries to understand what is happening in its general outlines: Minerva is coming round toward the wind. In her wake, a mile abaft, is the sloop, her sails lying a-shiver, leaving the little ship dead in the water, drifting slowly to leeward, as pirates try to beat out flames with sopped canvas whilst not stepping on any of those caltrops. Several miles north of that, four more ships are spread out on the bay, waiting.
A panic of luffing and shivering spreads through Minerva ’s rig as all the sails change their relationship to the wind, then everything snaps tight, just as the sailors knew it would, and she’s running as close-hauled as she can, headed northeast. In just a few minutes she’s drawn abeam of that scorched sloop, which is now steaming, rather than smoking, and attempting to make sail. It’s obvious that caltrops and flying crockery-shards have deranged the crew, in the sense that no man knows what to do when. So the sloop’s movements are inconclusive.
All the more surprising that van Hoek orders a tack, when it isn’t really necessary. Minerva comes about and sails directly toward the meandering sloop. Several minutes later, Minerva bucks once as she rams the sloop amidships, then shudders as her keel drives the wreckage under the sea. Those burly forecastlemen go out with cutlasses and hatchets to cut shreds of the sloop’s rigging away from the bowsprit, where it has become fouled. Van Hoek, strolling on the poop deck, aims a pistol over the rail and, in a sudden lily of smoke, speeds a drowning pirate to Hell.
“IRENEW MY OBJECTION -” said Robert Boyle. “It does not seem respectful to inventory the contents of our Founder’s guts as if they were a few keepsakes left behind in a chest-”
“Overruled,” said John Comstock, still President of the Royal Society-just barely. “Though, out of respect for our remarkably generous host, I will defer to him.”
Thomas More Anglesey, Duke of Gunfleet, was seated at the head of his drawing-room, at a conspicuously new gilt-and-white-enamel table in the barock style. Other bigwigs, such as John Comstock, surrounded him, seated according to equally barock rules of protocol. Anglesey withdrew a large watch from the pocket of his Persian vest and held it up to the light streaming in through about half an acre of window-glass, exceptionally clear and colorless and bubble-free and recently installed.
“Can we get through it in fifty seconds?” he inquired.
Inhalations all round. In his peripheral vision, Daniel saw several old watches being stuffed into pockets-pockets that tended to be frayed, and rimmed with that nameless dark shine. But the Earl of Upnor and-of all people-Roger Comstock (who was sitting next to Daniel) reached into clean bright pockets, took out new watches, and managed to hold them up in such a way that most everyone in the room could see that each was equipped, not just with two but three hands, the third moving so quickly that you could see its progress round the dial-counting the seconds!
Many hunched glances, now, toward Robert Hooke, the Hephaestus of the tiny. Hooke managed to look as if he didn’t care about how impressed everyone was-which was probably true. Daniel looked over at Leibniz, sitting there with his box on his lap, who had a soulful, distant expression.
Roger Comstock, noting the same thing: “Is that how a German looks before he bursts into tears?”
Upnor, following Roger’s gaze: “Or before he pulls out his broadsword and begins mowing down Turks.”
“He deserves our credit for showing up at all,” Daniel murmured-hypnotized by the movement of Roger Comstock’s second-hand. “Word arrived yesterday-his patron died in Mainz.”
“Of embarrassment, most likely,” hissed the Earl of Upnor.
A chirurgeon, looking deeply nervous and out of his depth, was chivvied up to the front of the room. It was a big room, this. Its owner, the Duke of Gunfleet, perhaps too much under the spell of his architect, insisted on calling it the Grand Salon. This was simply French for Big Big Room; but it seemed a little bigger, and ever so much grander, when the French nomenclature was used.
Even under the humble appellation of Big Big Room, it was a bit too big and too grand for the chirurgeon. “Fifty seconds!-?” he said.
There was a difficult interlude, lasting much longer than fifty seconds, as a helpful Fellow tried to explain the idea of fifty seconds to the chirurgeon, who had got stuck on the misconception that they were speaking of 1Z52s-perhaps some idiom from the gambling world?
“Think of minutes of longitude,” someone called out from the back of the Big Big Room. “One sixtieth of that sort of a minute is called what?”
“A second of longitude,” said the chirurgeon.
“By analogy, then, one sixtieth of a minute of time is-”
“A second… of time,” said the chirurgeon; then was suddenly mortified as he ran through some rough calculations in his head.
“One thirty-six-hundredth of an hour,” called out a bored voice with a French accent.
“Time’s up!” announced Boyle, “Let us move on-”
“The good doctor may have another fifty seconds,” Anglesey ruled.
“Thank you, my lord,” said the chirurgeon, and cleared his throat. “Perhaps those gentlemen who have been the patrons of Mr. Hooke’s horologickal researches, and are now the beneficiaries of his so ingenious handiwork, will be so kind as to keep me informed, during my presentation of the results of Lord Chester’s post-mortem, as to the passage of time-”
“I accept that charge-you have already spent twenty seconds!” said the Earl of Upnor.