Thus they wandered for most of October. It turned out that the storm had done irreparable injury to the foremast, rendering it more trouble than it was worth, and so they lost a knot or two. Sometimes the wind would grow frigid and bear down out of the north, pushing them toward the latitude of thirty-five degrees, which was the lowest that van Hoek would tolerate. Then they would have to work painstakingly into the wind. The cold spray blew into the faces of the Filipino and Malay sailors like chips of flint. Van Hoek's insistence on remaining far to the north led them to grumble. Jack did not think they were going to mutiny, but he could easily imagine circumstances in which they would. The difference in climate between thirty-five and forty degrees was considerable, and winter was making no secret of its intentions.
They had no idea where they were. Indeed, the very notion of being somewhere lost its hold on their minds after they had gone for a month without seeing any land; if some Fellow of the Royal Society had been a-board with a newfangled instrument for measuring longitude, the figures would have meant nothing to them. Van Hoek made estimates based on their speed, and at one point announced that they had probably crossed over the meridian dividing the East from the West Hemisphere. But under close interrogation from Moseh, he admitted that it might have happened last week or that it might happen a week in the future.
Jack saw no difference between East water and West water. They were in a part of the world that, on the Doctor's maps, either had not appeared at all (it being considered sinful wastefulness to leave such a large expanse of fine vellum blank) or else had been covered up by some vast Barock cartouche with words printed on it in five-hundred-mile-high letters, surrounded by bare-breasted mermaids blasting away on conch-shells. Minerva had crawled underneath the legends, compass-roses, analemmas, and cartouches that were superimposed on all the world's maps and globes, and vanished from all charts, ceased to exist. Jack had a phant'sy of some young Princess in a drawing-room staring at a map, and seeing a bit of movement under the eastern edge of some bit of engraver's trompe l'oeil, a scrap of faux-weather-beaten scrollwork where the cartographer had writ his name. She would suppose it to be a wandering silverfish at first—then, peering at it through a magnifying lens, would resolve the outlines of a certain ship filled with mercury…
Anyway, he was not the only man aboard seeing strange visions, for one day early in November, the lookout let out a wail of mingled fear and confusion. It was not a cheering kind of sound, coming from a lookout, and so it got the attention of every man on board.
"He says that there is a ship in the distance—but not a ship of this world," Dappa said.
"What the hell does that mean?" van Hoek demanded.
"She sails upside-down. She leaps from place to place and her form shifts, as if she were a droplet of quicksilver trapped between sea and sky."
Jack found this marvelously poetickal, but van Hoek was all ready with a tedious explanation: "Tell him he is only seeing a mirage. It might be another ship that lies over the horizon, or it might be a reflection of our own vessel. But there is probably not another ship within two thousand miles of us, and so it is most likely the latter."
But every man who was not busy with something else ascended the ratlines and got in position to view this entertainment. Jack got up sooner and higher than most. As a shareholder, he slept in a cabin instead of belowdecks, and as an Englishman he kept his windows open unless there was a positive hurricane blowing, and he had escaped the never-ending round of catarrhs, influenzas, rheumatic malfunctions, and fœbrile disorders that eddied through the crew. At any rate he had more energy and better lungs than they did and so he climbed all the way to the topmast trestletrees: high enough that he could take in Minerva's whole length at a glance. At first the mirage was not visible, but van Hoek said that this was the common way of mirages and to be patient. So while he was being patient in the topmast trestletrees, Jack looked down at the crew, struggling up the ratlines and coughing, spitting, and scratching themselves just like the audience in a theatre, waiting for the show to begin. This was not such a bad similitude either. From the point of view of a drawing-room Princess, Minerva had vanished underneath a florid mermaid-cartouche. But from Minerva's point of view, it was the world that had disappeared—somewhat as players do when the story pauses between acts. With their wigs, costumes, swords, and stage-props they exeunt; nothing happens for a while; the audience shifts, mutters, farts, cracks hazel-nuts, hawks up phlegm; and if it is a better class of theatre, there begins a little play-within-the-play, an entr'acte.
"Mira!" someone shouted, and Jack looked up to see it.
The phantom-ship appeared to be no more than a cannon-shot away from them. At times it appeared quite normal and solid. Then it would split into two symmetrical images, one right-side-up and one upside-down, or it would warp and flit about, like a drop trapped between panes of glass and being moved hither and thither by the pressure of a finger.
But when it was solid and stable for a moment, it was obviously not Minerva but some other ship. It had men on it, and they had trimmed her sails to run before the wind, just as Minerva was doing. Several of them had climbed into her rigging to gawk and point at something.
"Does she have any cannon run out?" van Hoek inquired.
"It would be a strange part of the world to go a-pirating," said Dappa.
"Hmph!"
"She is running up a flag," said Moseh de la Cruz. "She must see us, as we see her!"
Red silk bloomed in the mirage, a sudden billowing of flame. In the middle of it a gold cross and some other heraldic designs. Every man sighed at once.
"It is the Manila Galleon!" Jack announced.
At this news van Hoek finally bestirred himself. He climbed to the maintop and began trying to fix his spyglass on the mirage, which was like trying to spear a flea with a jack-knife. There was a certain amount of cursing in Dutch. Jack had spent enough time with van Hoek to know why: For all her bulk and shoddy construction, the Manila Galleon had not only survived; she had come through the storm in better condition than Minerva, or at least without losing any of her masts.
After that it hailed for two straight days. One of the older sailors remarked that hail never occurred far from land. The wind came about into their teeth, and as they'd been pushed by inscrutable currents dangerously close to thirty-five degrees, they had no choice but to sail northwest for a day. When the weather cleared and the trade-wind returned, and they were able to steer towards California again, someone sighted a school of tunny fish. All agreed that tunny never ventured far from land—all except for van Hoek, who only rolled his eyes.
The day after that they once again caught sight of the Manila Galleon in a mirage. This time—though the image was fleeting and warped—they saw a jab of flame, which probably meant that the Galleon had fired a cannon in an effort to signal them. All hands shushed each other, but if any sound reached Minerva it was drowned out by the shushing. Accordingly van Hoek refused to fire an answering signal; the Galleon, he said, might be a hundred miles away, and there was no point in wasting gunpowder.
That evening one far-sighted man insisted he saw a column of smoke to the southeast, which he took to be an infallible sign of land. Van Hoek said it was probably a waterspout. Still, several men loitered at that quarter of the ship, looking at it while the sun went down. Sunsets at this latitude, in November, were long and gradual, so they had plenty of time to look at this apparition, whatever it was, as the horizontal red light of dusk reflected from it.