Chapter 1420 - The Yacht
"Thank you, but would you be so kind as to tell me what those windmills are about? They're lined up one after another, looking like a forest."
The captain looked puzzled at the sea glittering with white light. It was quite a while before he understood that the Count was pointing toward Cavite.
"That's Cavite Fortress—ah, no, you must mean the shipyard. The windmills are also the Japanese fellow's doing, used to pump water from the dry dock. Do you like them?"
"I do," said Vince. "In my youth, I was fortunate enough to travel in the Canary Islands—a land of windmills. So this scene looks particularly familiar to me. What sort of person is this Japanese you mentioned? I'd rather like to meet him."
"You won't be able to see him. Although he's a layman, his manner is like that of an ascetic or hermit. He sees no one except the Governor and the Archbishop. Even his beautiful fiancée, who endured such hardships to come to Manila, probably hardly ever sees him—a pitiable beauty indeed..."
The captain's mustache quirked suggestively. "However, our esteemed Commander Alfonso has frequent dealings with him. He can introduce you later."
"Señor Alfonso—that worthy gentleman was absent from our match today."
"He has a battle to fight," the captain said with a sour note in his voice. "The Governor gave him four companies and a thousand natives to attack the Ilocanos of Pangasinan. The Japanese fellow went along too, to look after the cannons and rockets he made."
Vince was about to follow Captain Pilar down from the gun platform when suddenly a distant, muffled gunshot seemed to be carried over by the wind, followed by another.
"What's that?" Pilar raised his telescope. "Coming from Corregidor—could it be a signal from the lightship?"
The two took turns looking through the telescope. The sunlight reflected off the sea was so fierce it was almost impossible to open one's eyes. They could only vaguely make out several white sails flickering on the horizon. After nearly an hour, Vince saw a puff of smoke rise from Cavite Fortress, followed by a cannon report.
"Damn it! A ship has broken into the bay!" the captain cried, his hands gripping the merlon. "Sound the alarm! Battle stations!"
The sentry rang the alarm bell. As the bells pealed, the company drummers began beating the assembly call. Gunners poured from the barracks and ran to their positions. Infantrymen donned their armor and began forming ranks.
Vince knew it was no longer appropriate to stay here. He descended the stairs. He had just stepped out of the fortress when he saw a panic-stricken Don Basilio galloping toward him.
"I sent men searching everywhere for you," the port customs officer gasped, unceremoniously removing his hat to wipe his brow. "Holy Virgin Mary, look at what your sailors have done! Your yacht is going to alarm the Governor."
"Don Basilio, I shouldn't have to teach you how to address a nobleman!" Vince replied arrogantly. "What on earth has happened?"
Half an hour later, Vince sat in a small sampan rowing out into the bay. The customs officer sprawled beside the helmsman, chattering on about how a fast ship had ignored the warning from the Corregidor patrol boat and broken into Manila Bay, cruising about inside the harbor at "astonishing speed." None of the patrol galleys or warships in the harbor could catch up to this ship. Finally, the sailors aboard agreed to let an unarmed small boat approach, and only then did the port officials learn that this fast ship belonged to the Count.
The small sampan cut through the waves to the rhythm of the oarsmen's chant. The two-masted yacht that had thrown Manila Bay into such an uproar gradually came into view—its elegant, elongated black hull, its handsome Victorian livery. As the sampan drew closer, Vince looked up and saw a familiar weapon in the masthead fighting top trained on them—a typewriter.
Along the gunwale and the quarterdeck, sailors with rifles were at their posts, covering the surrounding waters and warning off native canoes.
The sailors lowered a gangway, and Vince climbed up from the sampan. As he stepped onto the last rung, a hand pulled him onto the deck.
"Welcome back!" said Xue Ziliang.
The Haiqi—or by its new name intended to deceive the Spanish, the Esmeralda—had originally been a private yacht built by the Hong Kong shipyard for the wealthy Portuguese merchant Landeira of Macao. The ever-shrewd Industrial Sector never missed any opportunity to exploit foreign clients, so Mr. Landeira's order was switched from the Hong Kong Shipyard to the Bopu Shipyard, becoming an excellent test subject. Someone even proposed building this yacht as a catamaran or trimaran. In the end, these overly alarming suggestions were vetoed.
The final hull design was essentially derived from the 200-ton two-masted patrol boat, using the already mature iron-frame wooden-hull construction. The displacement was slightly reduced, the length-to-beam ratio increased, and bilge keels were added to enhance stability. However, when the hull was basically complete and workers were nailing copper sheathing to the bottom, unfortunate news arrived: Mr. Landeira had gone bankrupt. One of his merchant ships had struck a reef and sunk outside Makassar, and another, laden with precious sandalwood from Timor, had become a Dutch prize.
Naturally, the bankrupt Mr. Landeira could not pay the remaining forty percent of the balance. The yacht, over ninety percent complete, became the property of the Planning Institute.
The Navy fought many verbal battles with the Agricultural Committee, the Special Investigation Team, and the Long-Range Exploration Team before finally getting its wish and obtaining this ship for sail training. The condition was that it had to be ready at all times to perform VIP and critical materiel transport missions ordered by the Executive Committee.
The Hong Kong Shipyard made numerous modifications large and small according to the Navy's requirements. To familiarize the naval cadets with different rigging, the original two-masted fore-and-aft sail design was eventually transformed into what Qian Shuiting called a "brigantine"—square sails on the foremast, fore-and-aft sails on the mainmast. After all these twists and turns, the sailing training ship Haiqi, evolved from a yacht, was commissioned into the Navy at the Hong Kong base.
As for how it later transformed into the Count of Fananovoua's private yacht Esmeralda, playing a role in an operation jointly led by the intelligence services—that was something no one could have foreseen at the time.
"Don't sail the ship into that stinking ditch called the Pasig River," Vince said.
The Esmeralda lowered sail and dropped anchor near the beach at Tondo, prudently keeping its distance from the red-hot-shot cannons of Fort Santiago. Tondo was, in another time-space, the Philippines' largest and most densely populated slum. Now it was merely an unremarkable little village on the north bank of the Pasig River. Though sparsely populated, the handsome yacht still attracted plenty of attention. A dozen or so canoes laden with goods gradually gathered around. Dark-skinned natives waved their arms and shouted in various incomprehensible languages, hawking pineapples, bananas, mangoes, and taro to the crew.
The yacht's sailors were unmoved, merely pointing their black muzzles at anyone who tried to approach. Boarding a ship under the pretext of selling goods and then robbing it was a common trick of Malay pirates, and both Chinese and European merchant ships sailing these waters had suffered from it.
The patrol ship's captain stood on the wooden crosspiece at the top of a sampan, leaning so far forward it seemed a single stumble would send him into the water. Yet he remained perfectly steady in that posture, staring at the Esmeralda as it drew ever closer.
In the eyes of a Basque old salt who had sailed halfway around the world, this barracuda-sleek fast sailing yacht was a rare beauty. Not only were her proportions perfect, but every detail of the ship was exquisitely and symmetrically crafted.
After the three-banked oar patrol ship had chased away the native canoes, it shipped oars and faced the yacht head-on, stopping two cables away. Before getting into the sampan, the captain had ordered that the cannon on the forecastle platform be combat-ready and that the swivel guns on both sides be loaded and ready to fire at any moment.
But his orders came to nothing. Except for the oarsmen below deck, all the sailors and soldiers, whether on duty or not, had crowded onto the forecastle and quarterdeck, even climbing the masts with their sails furled, to gawk at this strange tall-masted, narrow-hulled sailing ship the likes of which they had never seen.
"Rabble," Xue Ziliang said, jerking his chin toward the forecastle gun platform of the galley, which was packed with men. A Tagalog sailor was straddling the iron spike of the bow ram, meaninglessly waving a linstock for lighting cannons, while the gun he was supposed to fire was several meters behind him, its muzzle blocked by people. "Just swing the typewriter around and give them a few long bursts, and that pathetic wreck would become a floating coffin. Those idiots wouldn't even have time to fart."
The sampan bumped alongside the yacht with a few soft thuds. The patrol ship captain grabbed the rope ladder on the side and bounded up onto the deck in a few steps, completely ignoring the two pot-bellied port officials who were still struggling and swaying on the ladder until the yacht's sailors hauled them aboard.
The captain felt puzzled. This yacht's lines were unlike any other—long, flowing, and very smooth. There was no towering superstructure, no prominent figurehead, and none of the elaborate carvings that usually extended from both sides all the way to the quarterdeck. All he could see were neatly coiled ropes, some machinery of unknown purpose, and a teak deck polished to a mirror shine.
Taking two steps forward, he immediately understood why the deck was so reflective. A team of barefoot sailors—obviously Chinese—were following a hose and scrubbing the deck. Then they scattered sand on it and got down on their hands and knees, vigorously polishing it with stones. These Chinese were utterly unlike the listless, slovenly fellows on junks. They wore neat blue uniforms, their collars turned flat over their shoulders and backs in the Dutch style. Round-brimmed straw hats with white cap bands revealed cropped hair beneath. They were energetic but spoke little, moving in unison to the boatswain's whistle.
This sight made the captain reminisce about his own days as an apprentice seaman. He failed to notice the scupper at the edge of the gunwale. Seawater sprayed from the hose and washed across the deck, reaching his boots before he realized it. He hurriedly jumped aside to avoid the dirty water, only to crash straight into someone.