Shogun (The Asian Saga Chronology) Read Free

and fifty-six men in the fleet had died of starvation, cold, and the flux and they were eating the calfskin that covered the ropes.  The terrible storms within the Strait had scattered the fleet.  Erasmus was the only ship that made the rendezvous off Chile.  They had waited a month for the others and then, the Spaniards closing in, had set sail into the unknown.  The secret rutter stopped at Chile.
    Blackthorne walked back along the corridor and unlocked his own cabin door, relocking it behind him.  The cabin was low-beamed, small, and orderly, and he had to stoop as he crossed to sit at his desk.  He unlocked a drawer and carefully unwrapped the last of the apples he had hoarded so carefully all the way from Santa Maria Island, off Chile.  It was bruised and tiny, with mold on the rotting section.  He cut off a quarter.  There were a few maggots inside.  He ate them with the flesh, heeding the old sea legend that the apple maggots were just as effective against scurvy as the fruit and that, rubbed into the gums, they helped prevent your teeth from falling out.  He chewed the fruit gently because his teeth were aching and his gums sore and tender, then sipped water from the wine skin.  It tasted brackish.  Then he wrapped the remainder of the apple and locked it away.
    A rat scurried in the shadows cast by the hanging oil lantern over his head.  Timbers creaked pleasantly.  Cockroaches swarmed on the floor.
    I'm tired.  I'm so tired.
    He glanced at his bunk.  Long, narrow, the straw palliasse inviting.
    I'm so tired.
    Go to sleep for this hour, the devil half of him said.  Even for ten minutes—and you'll be fresh for a week.  You've had only a few hours for days now, and most of that aloft in the cold.  You must sleep.  Sleep.  They rely on you. . . .
    "I won't, I'll sleep tomorrow," he said aloud, and forced his hand to unlock his chest and take out his rutter.  He saw that the other one, the Portuguese one, was safe and untouched and that pleased him.  He took a clean quill and began to write:  "April 21 1600.  Fifth hour.  Dusk.  133d day from Santa Maria Island, Chile, on the 32 degree North line of latitude.  Sea still high and wind strong and the ship rigged as before.  The color of the sea dull gray-green and bottomless.  We are still running before the wind along a course of 270 degrees, veering to North North West, making way briskly, about two leagues, each of three miles this hour.  Large reefs shaped like a triangle were sighted at half the hour bearing North East by North half a league distant.
    "Three men died in the night of the scurvy—Joris sailmaker, Reiss gunner, 2d mate de Haan.  After commending their souls to God, the Captain-General still being sick, I cast them into the sea without shrouds, for there was no one to make them.  Today Bosun Rijckloff died.
    "I could not take the declension of the sun at noon today, again due to overcast.  But I estimate we are still on course and that landfall in the Japans should be soon. . . .
    "But how soon?" he asked the sea lantern that hung above his head, swaying with the pitch of the ship.  How to make a chart?  There must be a way, he told himself for the millionth time.  How to set longitude?  There must be a way.  How to keep vegetables fresh?  What is scurvy—?
    "They say it's a flux from the sea, boy,"  Alban Caradoc had said.  He was a huge-bellied, great-hearted man with a tangled gray beard.
    "But could you boil the vegetables and keep the broth?"
    "It sickens, lad.  No one's ever discovered a way to store it."
    "They say that Francis Drake sails soon."
    "No.  You can't go, boy."
    "I'm almost fourteen.  You let Tim and Watt sign on with him and he needs apprentice pilots."
    "They're sixteen.  You're just thirteen."
    "They say he's going to try for Magellan's Pass, then up the coast to the unexplored region—to the Californias—to find the Straits of Anian that join Pacific with Atlantic.  From the