His advisers were not enthusiastic about the plan. For one thing, the treasury was still depleted. For another, the Ming court was already drained by all the previous dramatic events of the Wanli reign, not only the defence of Korea but also the racking dissension caused by the succession problem, still only nominally solved by the Wanli’s choice of his elder son, and his younger son’s banishment to the provinces; all that could change in a week. And around that highly combustible situation, like a civil war in waiting, constellated all the conflicts and jealous manoeuvrings of the court powers: the Empress Mother, the Empress, the senior civil servants, the eunuchs and the generals. Something in the Wanli’s combination of intelligence and vacillation, his permanent discontent and his occasional bursts of vengeful fury, made the court of his old age a flayed and exhausted nest of intrigues. To his advisers, particularly the generals and the heads of the treasury, conquering Nippon did not seem even remotely possible.
The Emperor, true to form, insisted that it be done.
His senior generals came back with an alternative plan, which they hoped very much would satisfy his desire. They proposed that the Emperor’s diplomats arrange a treaty with one of the minor Nipponese shoguns, the Tozama Daimyo, who were out of Ieyasu’s favour because they had joined him only after his military victory at Sekigahara. The treaty would stipulate that this minor shogun would invite the Chinese to come to one of his ports, and open it permanently to Chinese trade. A Chinese navy would then land at this port in force, and in essence make the port a Chinese port, defended by the full power of the Chinese navy, grown so much bigger during the Wanli’s reign in the attempt to defend the coast against pirates. Most of the pirates were from Nippon, so there was a kind of justice there; and a chance to trade with Nippon as well. After that, the treaty port could serve as the staging centre of a slower conquest of Nippon, conceived of as happening in stages rather than all at once. That would make it affordable.
The Wanli grumbled about his advisers’ meagre, partial, eunuchlike enactments of his desires, but patient advocacy by his most trusted advisers of that period finally won him over, and he approved the plan. A secret treaty was arranged with a local lord, Omura, who invited the Chinese to land and trade at a small fishing village with an excellent harbour, called Nagasaki. Preparations for an expedition that would arrive there with overwhelming force were made in the rebuilt shipyards of Longjiang, near Nanjing, also on the Cantonese coast. The big new ships of the invading fleet were filled with supplies to enable the landing force to withstand a long siege, and they assembled for the first time off the coast of Taiwan, with no one in Nippon except for Omura and his advisers any the wiser.
The fleet was, by the Wanli’s direct order, put under the command of one Admiral Kheim, of Annam. This admiral had already led a fleet for the Emperor, in the subjugation of Taiwan some years before, but he was still seen by the Chinese bureaucracy and military as an outsider, an expert in pirate suppression who had achieved his expertise by spending much of his youth as a pirate himself, plundering the Fujian coast. The Wanli Emperor did not care about this, and even regarded it as a point in Kheim’s favour; he wanted someone who could get results, and if he came from outside the military bureaucracy, with its many entanglements at court and in the provinces, so much the better.
The fleet set out in the thirty-eighth year of the Wanli, on the third day of the first month. The spring winds were constant from the northwest for eight days, and the fleet positioned itself in the Kuroshio, the Black River, that great ocean current which runs like a river a hundred li wide, up the long southern shores of the Nipponese islands.
This was as planned, and they were on their way; but then the winds died. Nothing in the air stirred. No bird was seen, and the paper sails of the fleet hung limp, their cross-slats ticking the masts only because of the rippling of the Kuroshio itself, which carried them north and east past the main Nipponese islands, past Hokkaido, and out onto the empty expanse of the Dahai, the Great Ocean. This shoreless blue expanse was bisected by their invisible but powerful Black River, flowing relentlessly east.
Admiral Kheim ordered all the captains of the Eight Great Ships and of the Lesser Eighteen Ships to row over to the flagship, where they consulted. Many of the most experienced ocean sailors of Taiwan, Annam, Fujian and Canton were among these men, and their faces were grave; to be carried off by the Kuroshio was a dangerous business. All of them had heard stories of junks that had been becalmed in the current, or dismasted by squalls, or had had to chop down their masts in order to avoid being capsized, and after that disappeared for years — in one story nine years, in another thirty — after which they had drifted back out of the southeast, bleached and empty, or manned by skeletons. These stories, and the eyewitness evidence of the flagship’s doctor, I-Chen, who claimed to have ridden around the Dahai successfully in his youth on a fishing junk disabled by a typhoon, led them to agree that there was probably a big circular current flowing around the vast sea, and. that if they could stay alive long enough, they might be able to sail around in it, back to home.
It was not a plan any of them would have chosen to undertake deliberately, but at that point they had no other option but to try it. The captains sat in the Admiral’s cabin on the flagship and regarded each other unhappily. Many of the Chinese there knew the legend of Hsu Fu, admiral of the Han dynasty of ancient times, who had sailed off with his fleet in search of lands to settle on the other side of the Dahai, and never been heard from again. They knew as well the story of Kubla Khan’s two attempts at invading Nippon, both demolished by unseasonable typhoons, which had given the Nipponese the conviction that there was a divine wind that would defend their home islands from foreign attack. Who could disagree? And it seemed all too possible that this divine wind was now doing its work in a kind of joke or ironic reversal, manifesting itself as a divine calm while they were in the Kuroshio, causing their destruction just as effectively as any typhoon. The calm after all was uncannily complete, its timing miraculously good; it could be they had got caught up in gods’ business. That being the case, they could only give their fate over to their own gods, and hope to ride things out.
This was not Admiral Kheim’s favoured mode of being. “Enough,” he said darkly, ending the meeting. He had no faith in the sea gods’ good will, and took no stock in old stories, except as they were useful. They were caught in the Kuroshio; they had some knowledge of the currents of the Dahai — that north of the equator they ran east, south of the equator, west. They knew the prevailing winds tended to follow likewise. The doctor, I-Chen, had successfully ridden the entirety of this great circle, his unprepared ship’s crew living off fish and seaweed, drinking rainwater, and stopping for supplies at islands they passed. This was cause for hope. And as the air remained eerily calm, hope was all they had. It was not as if they had any other options; the ships were dead in the water, and the big ones were too big to row anywhere. In truth they had no choice but to make the best of it.
Admiral Kheim therefore ordered most of the men of the fleet to get on board the Eighteen Lesser Ships, and ordered half of these to row north, half south, with the idea they could row at an angle out of the Black Stream, and sail home when the wind returned, to get word to the Emperor concerning what had happened. The Eight Great Ships, manned by the smallest crews that could sail them, with as much of the fleet’s supplies as could be fitted in their holds, settled in to wait out the ride around the ocean on the currents. If the smaller ones succeeded in sailing back to China, they were to tell the Emperor to expect the Great Eight to return at some later date, out of the southeast.
In a couple of days the smaller ships all disappeared over the horizon, and the Eight Great Ships drifted on, roped together in a perfect calm, off the maps to the unknown east. There was nothing else they could do.
• • •
Thirty days passed without the slightest breeze. Each day they rode the current farther to the cast.
No one had
ever seen anything like it. Admiral Kheim rejected all talk of the Divine Calm, however; as he pointed out, the weather had gone strange in recent years, mostly much colder, with lakes freezing over that had never frozen before, and freak winds, such as certain whirlwinds that had stood in place for weeks at a time. Something was wrong in the heavens. This was just part of that.
When the wind returned at last, it was strong from the west, pushing them even farther along. They angled south across the prevailing wind, but cautiously now, hoping to stay within the hypothetical great circle current, as being the fastest way around the ocean and back home. In the middle of the circle there was rumoured to be a permanent zone of calm, perhaps the very centrepoint of the Dahai, as it was near the equator, and perhaps equidistant from shores east and west, though no one could say for sure about that. A doldrums that no junk could escape, in any case. They had to go out far enough to the east to get around that, then head south, then, below the equator, back west again.
They saw no islands. Seabirds sometimes flew over, and they shot a few with arrows and ate them for luck. They fished day and night with nets, and caught flying fish in their sails, and pulled in snarls of seaweed that grew increasingly rare, and refilled their water casks when it rained, setting funnels like inverted umbrellas over them. And they were seldom thirsty, and never hungry.
But never a sight of land. The voyage went on, day after day, week after week, month after month. The rattan and the rigging began to wear thin. The sails grew transparent. Their skin began to grow transparent.
The sailors grumbled. They no longer approved of the plan to ride the circle of currents around the great sea; but there was no turning back, as Kheim pointed out to them. So they passed through their grumbling, as through a storm. Kheim was not an admiral anyone wanted to cross.
They rode out storms in the sky, and felt the rocking of storms under the sea. So many days passed that their lives before the voyage grew distant and indistinct; Nippon, Taiwan, even China itself began to seem like dreams of a former existence. Sailing became the whole world: a water world, with its blue plate of waves under an inverted bowl of blue sky, and nothing else. They no longer even looked for land. A mass of seaweed was as astonishing as an island would once have been. Rain was always welcome, as the occasional periods of rationing and thirst had taught them painfully their utter reliance on fresh water. This mostly came from rain, despite the little stills that I-Chen had constructed to clarify salt water, which gave them a few buckets a day.
All things were reduced to their elemental being. Water was ocean; air was sky; earth, their ships; fire, the sun, and their thoughts. The fires banked down. Some days Kheim woke, and lived, and watched the sun go down again, and realized that he had forgotten to think a single thought that whole day. And he was the admiral.
Once they passed the bleached wreckage of a huge junk, intertwined with seaweed and whitened with bird droppings, barely afloat. Another time they saw a sea serpent out to the east, near the horizon, perhaps leading them on.
Perhaps the fire had left their minds entirely, and was in the sun alone, burning above through rainless days. But something must have remained — grey coals, almost burnt out — for when land poked over the horizon to the cast, late one afternoon, they shouted as if it was all they had ever thought of, in every moment of the hundred and sixty days of their unexpected journey. Green mountainsides, falling precipitously into the sea, apparently empty; it didn’t matter; it was land. What looked to be a large island.
• • •
The next morning it was still there ahead of them. Land ho!
Very steep land, however, so steep that there was no obvious place to make landfall: no bays, no river mouths of any size; just a great wall of green hills, rising wetly out of the sea.
Kheim ordered them to sail south, thinking even now of the return to China. The wind was in their favour for once, and the current also. They sailed south all that day and the next, without a single harbour to be seen. Then, as light fog lifted one morning, they saw they had passed a cape, which protected a sandy southern reach; and farther south there was a gap in the hills, dramatic and obvious. A bay. There was a patch of turbulent white water on the north side of this majestic entrance strait, but beyond that it was clear sailing, and the flood tide helping to usher them in.
So they sailed into a bay like nothing any of them had ever seen in all their travels. An inland sea, really, with three or four rocky islands in it, and hills all around, and marshes bordering most of its shores. The hills were rocky on top but mostly forested, the marshes lime green, yellowed by autumn colours. Beautiful land; and empty!
They turned north and anchored in a shallow inlet, protected by a hilly spine that ran down into the water. Then some of them spotted a line of smoke rising up into the evening air.
“People,” I-Chen said. “But I don’t think this can be the western end of the Muslim lands. We haven’t sailed far enough for that, if Hsing Ho is correct. We shouldn’t even be close yet.”
“Maybe it was a stronger current than you thought.”
“Maybe. I can refine our distance-from-equator tonight.”
“Good.”
But a distance-from-China would have been better, and that was the calculation they could not make. Dead reckoning had been impossible during the long period of their drift, and despite I-Chen’s continual guesses, Kheim didn’t think they knew their distance-from-China to within a thousand li.
As for distance-from-equator, I-Chen reported that night, after measuring the stars, that they were at about the same line as Edo or Beijing a little higher than Edo, a little lower than Beijing. I-Chen tapped his astrolabe thoughtfully. “It’s the same level as the hui countries in the far west, in Fulan where all the people died. If Hsing Ho’s map can be trusted. Fulan, see? A harbour called Lisboa. But there’s no Fulan-chi here. I don’t think this can be Fulan. We must have come upon an island.”
“A big island!”
“Yes, a big island.” I-Chen sighed. “If we could only solve the distance-from-China problem.”
It was an everlasting complaint with him, causing an obsession with clockmaking; an accurate clock would have made it possible to calculate longitude, using an almanac to give the star times in China, and timing from there. The Emperor had some fine timepieces in his palace, it was said, but they had no clock on their ship. Kheim left him to his muttering.
The next morning they woke to find a group of locals, men, women and children, dressed in leather skirts, shell necklaces, and feather headdresses, standing on the beach watching them. They had no cloth, it appeared, and no metal except small bits of hammered gold, copper and silver. Their arrowheads and spear tips were flaked obsidian, their baskets woven of reeds and pine needles. Great mounds of shells lay heaped on the beach above the high-tide mark, and the visitors could see smoke rising from fires set inside wicker hovels, little shelters like those the poor farmers in China used for their pigs in winter.
The sailors laughed and chattered to see such people. They were partly relieved and partly amazed, but it was impossible to be frightened of these folk.
Kheim was not so sure. “They’re like the wild people on Taiwan,” he said. “We had some terrible fights with them when we went after pirates in the mountains. We have to be careful.”
I-Chen said, “Tribes like that exist on some of the Spice Islands too, I’ve seen them. But even those people have more things than these.”
“No brick or wood houses, no iron that I can see, meaning no guns . . .”
“No fields for that matter. They must eat the clams,” pointing at the great shell heaps, “and fish. And whatever they can hunt or glean. These are poor people.”
“That won’t leave much for us.”
“No.”
The sailors were shouting down at them: “Hello! Hello!”
Kheim ordered them to be quiet. He and I-Chen got in one of the little rowing boats they had on the great ship, and
had four sailors row them ashore.
From the shallows Kheim stood and greeted the locals, palms up and out, as one did in the Spice Islands with the wild ones. The locals didn’t understand anything he said, but his gestures made plain his peaceful intent, and they seemed to recognize it. After a while he stepped ashore, confident of a peaceful welcome, but instructing the sailors to keep their flintlocks and crossbows below the seats at the ready, just in case.
On shore he was surrounded by curious people, babbling in their own tongue. Somewhat distracted by the sight of the women’s breasts, he greeted a man who stepped forward, whose elaborate and colourful headdress perhaps confirmed him as their headman. Kheim’s silk neck scarf, much salt-damaged and faded, had the image of a phoenix on it, and Kheim untied it and gave it to the man, holding it flat so he could see the image. The silk itself interested the man more than the image on it. “We should have brought more silk,” Kheim said to I-Chen