The Silver Lotus (6 page)

Captain Hammond and his men finally found a sheltered cove on the south end of Hainan Island that was just large enough to accommodate the ship, but with little or no room to maneuver her safely, they were forced to kedge the ship stern-first into the narrow cove. Despite laying out every anchor the ship possessed, and from all quarters, it still seemed that the next set of giant swells or waves would beach her on the rocks below the cliffs at any moment. However, by virtue of the crew's vigilance and constant readjustment of the anchor cables to keep the ship centered over her anchorage, total disaster was somehow avoided until dawn. Then, as if in answer to fervent prayers, the tail of the monsoon suddenly softened and then quietly moved to the north. At this point the crew were so spent that some of them simply fell asleep at their stations, and Lady Yee discovered her husband all wet and worn, fast asleep on a coil of cable outside the pilothouse.

About noon the captain and the crew had recovered enough energy to assess the damage and begin planning for repairs. In all, things looked worse than they really were, but both the gaff and boom on the foremast had been dangerously sprung and cracked, and would not carry sail without being first braced and fished, or totally replaced. But until such time,
The Silver Lotus
would have to depend on her headsails and a jury-rigged, loose-footed lateen arrangement on the foremast.

The crew spent the rest of the day making repairs. Their anchorage was so isolated by the rugged nature of surrounding cliffs that it precluded all habitation, so none of the islanders ever appeared, not even out of curiosity. Suddenly one of the men effecting repairs high on the foremast called down to the deck to say that a small fleet of junks were slowly patrolling back and forth just offshore. Each flew a small red pennant from the mainmast, but aside from that there was no telling who they were, or what their intentions might be, but for the present there
was no way for them to enter the inlet with
The Silver Lotus
occupying most of the channel.

Captain Hammond came on deck when he heard the call from the trees and took up his glass to examine the visitors more closely. Lady Yee soon joined her husband and asked to have a look for herself. They came to the same conclusion. Their visitors were Pearl River pirates from Guangdong, and their red pennant was the standard of the Wong Chi, the largest of the maritime triads. The pirates had somehow spotted the wounded behemoth, and believing she'd be easy prey, all bottled up as she was with no line of retreat, they began to quietly patrol back and forth like sharks awaiting seals. Captain Hammond immediately unbolted the arms locker and handed out double-barreled shotguns and large navy revolvers to a dozen men. He told them to arrange themselves around the deck so as to keep the ship covered on all quarters. Then he sent four men up the trees with heavy-caliber rifles and told both sets of guards to fire upon any junk that came within fifty yards of the ship, but to shoot just over their heads and shiver their sails and rigging. If possible, he wished to extricate his ship from this sticky situation without recourse to bloodshed, but he wanted the Wong Chi to see that he was adequately armed and willing to fire. Then he had the small signaling cannon taken forward and aimed over the bow. He told his men to give the diminutive howitzer a double charge of powder and to load it to the muzzle with broken glass, but no metal.

There was a great disparity in the size of
The Silver Lotus
, which was two hundred feet long with forty feet of beam, and the Pearl River junks, which were mostly less than forty-five feet in length. With
The Silver Lotus
in place, the channel would admit only one small junk at a time, which was not how the Wong Chi liked their odds. And since there was nowhere to land, it was impossible for the pirates to launch an attack from the landward side, so for the moment all the pirates could do was wait for their quarry to break from cover and then mob the ship
like crows before she could fully get under way and escape. This tactic had worked before, so the Wong Chi fleet confidently settled down and cruised just off the entrance to the channel. Some of the junks simply lowered their sails, anchored in place, and passed the time fishing. The Wong Chi, like all scavenging predators, had long since learned the virtues of patience. They were certainly impoverished, uncultured, and uneducated, but they were neither stupid nor rash, and if called upon to do so, would sell their lives at an exorbitant price indeed. The poor rarely showed signs of cowardice; their lives were worth so little as it was that little was lost if they died defending them. There was always another hungry mouth to take the place of the fallen. On the other hand, the rich could always think of a thousand reasons not to put their lives in jeopardy.

Captain Hammond called a council of his top men to the wheelhouse. He asked for suggestions on how to extricate themselves from their present dilemma. Since Lady Yee was present, most of them put a bold face on their responses and suggested fighting their way out sometime after sunset. There would be little or no moonlight, depending on the clouds, which would make it more difficult for the pirates to organize a concerted response. A few might be injured, but only if they failed to make fast work of their escape on the next outgoing tide.

Lady Yee, who had been standing in the corner, politely cleared her throat to gain attention. She had come to know the ways of men, and was always amused when they incessantly chose the same ill-considered and brutish responses to problems that could easily be solved by other means.

Captain Hammond turned to his wife, and with a knowledgeable smile he declared that, as a company officer, she had every right to make a better suggestion. It was then that Lady Yee posed a most marvelous and audacious suggestion. She began by pointing out that there was only one thing that really frightened bullies, thieves, and murderers,
whether ashore or at sea, and that was to convince the discourteous beggars that you are the penultimate bully, thief, and murderer. Lady Yee went on to say that it was just a matter of dressing the part, and then scaring their notoriously superstitious adversaries half to death with a totally unexpected display of some dumb-show barbarity. Native fear and insecurity would do all else required.

There was a complete, drop-jawed silence from her audience, but Lady Yee could see at once that she had their complete attention. Even her husband stood in rapt admiration, so she continued. She said that for the most part, at a distance there was little that differentiated a ship of evil purpose from one of peaceful intentions; even the flags could be confusing. So it would be necessary to advertise the ship's bloody intentions in such a way that the pirates could see it at some distance, and would thus be in no doubt of what to expect if the situation came to blows.

“To accomplish our intention,” she said, “and truly convince the Red Flag Wong Chi that
The Silver Lotus
means bloody business, we must dress up some of our crew like Chinese pirates, and then hang perhaps three or four by the neck from the foremast gaff and let them swing there in the wind.”

The look on the faces of her husband and the other men was just as Lady Yee had supposed. The hanging men, she explained, would be a complete illusion created by top men wearing canvas harnesses under their clothes and sporting fake death knots around their necks. With flour-caked faces, wild greased hair, and coal-smeared eyes, they were to perform the exaggerated gyrations and struggles expected of a man being slowly strangled at the end of a rope. While this was going on, she said, other members of the crew were to bang incessantly on pots and pans, or anything at all that made a din, while still others blew whistles and horns. Since they could only depart on the morning tide at five o'clock, and as it was expected that offshore winds would assist
their departure anyway, Lady Yee suggested that sand-filled fire buckets be loaded with burning sulfur and placed in the bows, to create a noxious cloud and so add verisimilitude to the illusion that the Wong Chi were about to face the deadliest pirate-killing ship from the bowels of hell. And rather than shoot guns at the pirates as they emerged from the inlet, she said, they should fire their red and green signal rockets horizontally and directly at the sails of the Wong Chi fleet. She admitted that the chances of hitting anything were remote, but the fire, sparks, and explosions would put the Wong Chi at a disadvantage. A rocket fired in the air was a relatively benign illumination, but when that same ball of fire came arching directly at a human target, it held another implication altogether. Even the fire caused by a direct hit might be easily extinguished with a few buckets of seawater, but in the fear and confusion
The Silver Lotus
might easily pass right through the Wong Chi fleet without suffering injury to a single soul. As a confirmed Buddhist with a firm grounding in all the important Confucian precepts, Lady Yee believed that the greatest victories were accomplished without bloodshed, and it seemed that every man in the wheelhouse was happy to agree.

Lady Yee went on to say that the Chinese traditionally held great store by the importance of flags to denote rank and purpose. Large flags of rich color held power, smaller pennants showed allegiance. Then there were flags bearing titles and proud slogans that were meant to intimidate opponents like the raising of a lion's hackles with bared teeth. The roar was still to come. She suggested that if the Wong Chi were flying small red pennants,
The Silver Lotus
should let fly a red banner the size of a bedsheet, and then hoist another large banner on which she would paint Chinese characters that communicated a terrifying threat: “We have come to eat the traitors to the Wong Chi. None shall enjoy further life or prosperity.” This intelligence, shocking as it would seem, just might encourage the pirates to suspect that for some
unknown reason they'd been betrayed, perhaps by their own triad. But it mattered little what they thought as long as the resulting confusion allowed
The Silver Lotus
to sail through the pirate fleet with negligible damage being suffered by either side.

The carpenter's mate ran about the ship collecting anything that looked remotely like a big gun, then painted it black and lashed it to the railings so it could be seen at a distance. The cook brought out every pot, pan, and ladle on deck and handed these out to those men assigned to create the unholy din when the ship got underway. The bosun's mate, who rather liked the idea of hanging some of his mates, climbed out on the foremast gaff to brace and lash the split with wet rawhide straps and rope. When he'd determined that the sprung gaff could take the weight, he drew up four tackle blocks one at a time and then carefully spaced and tied them off along the gaff. One end of the line was secured to the backs of the harnesses the boatswain had rigged up from canvas strapping reinforced with heavy leather. The other end was laced through a second block shackled to the deck, and then used to haul the man up into the air to swing under the gaff. A mock hangman's rope was affixed around the man's neck and tied off with light thread where it met the lifting line. If there were to be an accident, at least the volunteer wouldn't really hang for his courageous efforts.

The condemned men outdid themselves in attempts to look fearsome, gruesome, and dead, while the rest of the crew, including the cook, cabin boy, and carpenter, joined in on their own. They all put together outlandish costumes and made up their faces with flour, red lead, and coal dust. Mr. Lundy, who hailed from London, said it reminded him of an elaborate Guy Fawkes prank.

Captain Hammond took personal charge of the pyrotechnics, and following Lady Yee's philosophy of a bloodless assault even had the armed men remove the buckshot from some of their shotgun shells and reload them with extra powder and sulfur pellets so as to make
a more theatrically impressive display of increased noise, smoke, and fire. Just the men armed with the rifles were told to keep their loads, but they were only to fire if some of the Wong Chi managed to make it on deck. The captain took charge of mounting the two launchers for the distress rockets on either side of the ship. He had only eight red and eight green rockets, so he chose to launch them in alternating colors from either side of the ship. If the surrounding junk fleet moved in too close, he hoped it might have the desired effect, because the exercise was almost as dangerous for the people firing the rockets as it would be for the people being fired upon. If his ship caught fire in the process of self-defense, it would be a tainted victory at best. To cover that eventuality, he used wet canvas to erect a couple of dreadnought screens behind the launching tubes, and then had buckets of water stationed nearby in case his calculations proved in error. He had seen distress rockets prematurely explode just feet out of the tube. The resulting injuries could be terrible, so he decided that when the time came he would fire off the rockets himself. Lady Yee had brushed the appropriate characters on one canvas banner, but the red flag had to be painted as there was no red banner in the flag locker. Both flags were flying by three in the morning. The fire buckets, now half-filled with sand and topped with oil-soaked rags, were top-loaded with large nuggets of sulfur that, when burned, would create great noxious, ocher clouds of smoke. This process had been used for centuries to fumigate ships belowdecks, but except for encouraging the more sensitive rats to take up residence elsewhere and creating a terrible stink that, like oil, clung to everything for weeks, it was only marginally useful for its intended purpose. Captain Hammond believed the practice came from the ancient belief that if something smelled absolutely dreadful, it had to be dangerous, if not deadly, and in a number of instances that was true. On the other hand, when encouraged by the presence of gunpowder's heat, pressure, and flames, the results could be spectacular. In that
same vein, Captain Hammond decided to pull the charge of broken glass from the signal cannon. He was right in assuming it would have little or no effect except at very close range with a stationary target, and with the Wong Chi crew standing shoulder to shoulder on deck. He laughed when he thought of the odds. Instead he concocted a mixture of gunpowder, saltpeter, sulfur nuggets, and the contents of one of the red distress rockets that had been damaged in transit. He poured his mixture into a bag made from an old linen shirtsleeve, and after loading the cannon with a double charge of powder he slid his infernal machine down the barrel, tamped it hard in place, then drove in a protective plug made of rags soaked in hot beeswax. He rightly assumed that if nothing else, there would be one hell of a colorful explosion, with a rain of red fire descending everywhere. By four-thirty in the morning all the preparations were in hand.