Conrad Starguard - Conrad's Quest for Rubber Part 19

Chapter Twenty- Six

From the Journal of Josip Sobieski WRITTEN MARCH 7,1251, CONCERNING JANUARY 21, 1250.

THINGS WENT pretty much as First Officer Goszczynski said they would. Our superiors both declared themselves to be sick, and had their meals sent to their rooms. Slowly, the tension on board relaxed.

It was two days before we sighted land to starboard, and another day more until we had land to port.

A further half day took us upriver to a point where we were no longer bothered by big ocean waves.

A council of officers decided we were at a position that both of our superiors could live with, had they been sufficiently well to attend the meeting. We were on the equator, and we were definitely on an absolutely huge river. The current was strong, the water was fresh, and we had banks on both side of us.

We dropped anchor, broke out the the premade floats that would be the bottoms of the riverboats, and started lowering them down to the water level. We soon had a.s.sembly crews working under the wings on both sides of the s.h.i.+p.

The floats were the same size as our standard containers so they could fit into the s.h.i.+p's storage conveyors. Each float had a removable top, and most of them already contained the cargo that the riverboats would be carrying. They bolted together easily.

The steam engines were another matter, since they were heavy, and had to be mounted mostly behind and on top of the floats. a.s.sembling them was not as simple as the designers had hoped, what with the motion of the boats, the s.h.i.+p, and the water. We encountered several bothersome manufacturing defects, and as always, we were up against the innate perversity of inanimate objects.

Persevering, it was almost sunset when we had one boat a.s.sembled, another close to done, and a third boat started. An amazing thing was sighted then.

A lookout up in the crow's nest was the first to spot it, but I was taking a break on the rear deck at the time, so I saw the whole terrible affair.

There was a white line to the east, on the ocean horizon, going from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e. I soon noticed that it was getting bigger, and thicker, somehow, but I had no idea what it was. Neither did any of the s.h.i.+p's officers to whom I shouted.

Still, when strange things happen, it is best to act cautiously and get the men out of danger, even if it might slow down the job at hand.

I ran to the port side of the s.h.i.+p, under the wing, and shouted at the men working down there to get back up into the s.h.i.+p, and to do it quickly. Then I ran to the starboard side and repeated my message.

When I got back to the rear railing, the strange phenomenon had grown to the point where it was obviously coming at us, and at a pretty fair speed. I ran around in a triangle again and told everybody to hurry up, no s.h.i.+t, this was serious. Some fool made a joke about how a dragon was coming, and if I hadn't been worrying about saving his life, I would have shot him!

Some of the men that I'd trained myself, the men from myown platoon, scrambled up the netting we had hung over both sides, and those men lived. The ones who were waiting for the lift to come back down to get them got into trouble.

It was moving so fast that by the time the men below saw the huge wave, it was almost too late to do anything about it.

It was just one, single huge wave, with no big waves in front of it, or behind, either. But it was more than ten yards high, and it stretched from bank to rocky bank across the river!

It hit the stern of the s.h.i.+p, and she bucked up so fast that I was knocked down flat to the deck, on my stomach. I went down so hard that the wind was knocked out of me and I could neither move nor breathe.

Then a vast sheet of greenish-white water came down on top of me, flattening me even more. The fact that I couldn't breathe became unimportant, since I was underwater, anyway. Worse, I saw that I was about to be washed off the deck and into the river. To this day, I don't know how I managed to grab one of the stanchions that supported the railing.

I think it must have been the work of my guardian angel.

At that, I was hard-pressed to hold on, at first because of the thousands of tons of water streaming by me, and then because the s.h.i.+p was still vigorously bouncing up and down. Even so, I was one of the first men on my feet. I staggered forward to try to a.s.sess the damage and see where I could be of help.

There were dozens and dozens of men lying about, many of them badly injured, from skinned knees to broken legs, and even one broken neck. Blood ran from the wet deck, out the scuppers and into the water. It hurt to pa.s.s by my friends without helping, but in spite of their obvious wounds, if those men were still alive, they were likely to stay alive a few more minutes.

That might not be true of the men down on the water. When I got under the wing of the bridge, I leaned over the railing and looked down. Of the two boats that had been in the water on that side, the completed one was gone without a trace. Only the half-finished boat, where they hadn't started mounting the engine, was still afloat, and it was severely damaged.

Men were down in the water, and the current was sweeping them away! Ignoring the broken and bleeding men around me, I threw every life ring I could find overboard, and helped a few uninjured men get three of the s.h.i.+p's barges into the water.

We cut two of the barges free, and hoped that the men overboard would be able to help each other into them. We kept the third boat tethered, and a seaman slid down to it to see what he could do down there to help.

I ran to the port side of the s.h.i.+p, only to find Lezek doing the same job there that I had just done on the starboard. Here, too, the nearly finished boat was simply gone.

Kiejstut came up from below and shouted that the boilers were out, flooded with water. We could not get the engines going to pick up our lost men. Together, we made it to the s.h.i.+p's steam launches, only to find them both smashed.

He looked at me desperately.

"The anchor," he said.

Without another word, we both ran to the bow.

I would have expected that the wave that did so much damage would have pulled loose our anchor, or broken the cable, but no, it was still holding us in one place while the fast current was taking our men farther away every minute.

The release mechanism was jammed, but a few vigorous swings with an axe freed it up, permanently. As the cable was whirling away, Kiejstut took a life ring with a long rope tied to it, pa.s.sed the rope around the fast-moving cable, and made a slipknot at the end of it. Just before the last of the cable was gone, he had the end of it tied to a float.

I complimented his good thinking.

"I thought we might need the anchor again, and now we should be able to find it," he said.

"Anyway, it looked expensive, and the baron might have made us pay for it!"

I looked about. With the s.h.i.+p now drifting with the river, it was at least getting no farther away from the men in the water. There didn't seem to be anything more that we could do for those men, so we went aft to help with the wounded.

Our captain and the baron both had miraculous recoveries when the disaster occurred, as was only to be expected, and after a few moments of confusion, the two of them cooperated remarkably well in getting things back together.

Within the hour we had a current list of the dead, the wounded, and the missing. There were over ten dozen men somewhere in the dark, fast-moving water. Zbigniew, Taurus, and Fritz were among them.

The mechanics were six long army hours getting the engine room pumped out, the boilers repaired and refired, and the s.h.i.+p under way. By then it was dawn, and we went in search of our missing men.

Out of the s.h.i.+p's crew of ninety-one, six men were dead, eighteen were too seriously injured to work, and fourteen were still missing.

Of the two hundred sixty-two explorers, nine were dead, thirty-three were severely injured, and eighty-five were still missing. Most of the men doing the riverboat a.s.sembly work were explorers.

During the night, twenty-six men had managed to swim back to the s.h.i.+p and were taken aboard.

That wouldn't have happened if Kiejstut and I hadn't let loose the anchor. The baron noticed this, too, and made a note of it in our records. He also noted that if a storm had come up during the night, without engines or anchor, the s.h.i.+p could possibly have gone down to the bottom. He told us this verbally, and quite forcefully, but did not put it down in our records. A decent man, the baron.

One of the men who swam back that night was Fritz.

Overnight, the steam launches had been repaired, and with them a half mile to either side of us, we spent days sweeping back and forth across the river, and eventually out into the ocean. Lezek and I had set seven barges adrift, and in the end we recovered only four of them, with twenty-nine men aboard. Another eleven people were found alive in the warm river water.

Zbigniew and Taurus were still among the missing.

After a week of searching the river, the sea, and the sur-rounding sh.o.r.es for our missing comrades, we regretfully called off the search. The barges each contained a small emergency kit, but with even a few men on board, by this time the supplies would be long exhausted.

We had recovered a total of twenty-two floating corpses. The last dead man we pulled aboard was Taurus.

Baron Tados called an officers' meeting, to sum up what had happened.

This was the first maritime disaster suffered by the Christian Army, and we were all painfully aware of our ignorance and our inexperience. Careful notes were written up by everyone on board, to be delivered to the Maritime Design Board at Gdansk. Hopefully, some of our stupider mistakes would not be repeated the next time disaster struck. We all knew that someday, somewhere, it would happen again.

The baron thought that the disaster might have been caused by a tidal bore. The Baltic Sea doesn't have tides, any more than the Mediterranean Sea does, so we Poles were fairly ignorant of such things. Baron Tados had heard of only one other river in the world that had such a wave, the Severn River, in England, although he had never been there. It was said that they were caused by the mouth of a river having a funnel shape, and a big, incoming tide getting somehow focused, and made larger, as it rushed up the river.

I understood very little of it. I had heard Lord Conrad's lecture on the causes of tides, but I had never actually seen one, until that disastrous time on the Amazon River.

I didn't want to see any more of them.

Fritz had an interesting report. He said, "I think that I now know why our fuel consumption has been so high. I was in the water when the big wave lifted the s.h.i.+p up, and I got a good look at our bottom. We have an underwater forest growing down there! Some of the weeds looked to be two yards long!"

"There has been some growth below the waterline before, in the northern seas, but nothing that bad," the baron said. "It must be all this warm water we've been steaming through. Does anybody have any ideas on how to get rid of it without a dry dock? No? Then we'll just have to live with it for now."

Only one of the s.h.i.+p's crew was still missing, mostly because the crew wore bright red work clothing and so were easier to find in the water. The dark green explorer uniforms did us a great disservice that week.

Zbigniew had not been found.

As the meeting was about to break up, Captain Odon announced that he was having a barrel of whiskey broken out and set up in the mess. He said it was time to mourn our dead.

In a few minutes I found myself at a table with what was left of our old lance. Captain Odon.

Fritz. Lezek. Kiejstut. Me. The captain poured us each a big gla.s.s from the pitcher, and we held up our gla.s.ses, as if in a toast. Only n.o.body could think of anything appropriate to say, and we just drank in silence.

"I never expected Taurus to die an old man in bed," Kiejstut said. "He was just too crazy, underneath, for that. But I always imagined him going out swinging his axe at his enemies, the way he did during that fight against the Mongols, on the bank of the river. He must have killed dozens of them, running and screaming like a madman."

"I think that he truly was a madman then, so soon after his family had all been killed," Fritz said.

"He even took a swipe at me before Sir Odon took his axe away from him."

I reminded them that a few of his people were still alive, although after his last leave, he hadn't liked them very much.

"I suppose they'll think better of him now," Lezek said. "By their standards, Taurus died rich, what with his gold, his savings, and his shares in the iron mine. They'll inherit all that, won't they?"

"I suppose so, unless he left a will, and I never heard of one," Captain Odon said. "I think that after this, I will go and have one written up for myself. The rest of you might want to do the same. The s.h.i.+p's purser knows something about the law."

"Inside, somehow, I was beginning to think that we were all immortal," Kiejstut said. "We were always so lucky. I mean, we all lived through the Battle for the Vistula. Only about one man in three did that, out of the more than nine thousand men who fought in it, and every one of us came through it alive and healthy. What were the odds against that happening?"

"Who knows?" the captain said. "Who knows what the odds are of Zbigniew still being alive? Or if he is, will we ever see him again? We all knew that we were engaged in a dangerous occupation, but whoever thought we would lose men this way? Those were two of the finest fighting men I've ever had the privilege of knowing. Who would have expected them dying, not in combat, but in what was, in the end, just an accident brought on by our own ignorance? Well, we still have our duties to the younger men. I'll talk to Taurus's platoon, and Zbigniew's as well. Gentlemen, men have died in every one of your platoons. You should go and comfort the living. Maybe later tonight we'll meet back here."

We left to talk to our knights and squires, but much later we were all sitting around the same table again, quietly drinking.

In the morning we said a special Ma.s.s for the Dead, recited our Army Oath, and then we went back to our duties.

We steamed back up the mighty river, and by luck one of the lookouts spotted the life ring that Kiejstut had attached to the anchor cable. An hour's hard labor got us back our anchor.

We anch.o.r.ed upstream of a wooded, uninhabited island, on the theory that if another tidal bore happened, the island would break its force. We started a.s.sembling riverboats again, while others went to the island and began chopping firewood, which was needed both to ensure that the s.h.i.+p got home and as fuel for our four remaining riverboats.

The disaster had cost us, in dead, missing, and seriously injured, almost two complete platoons of explorers, including two platoon leaders. Since we were also missing two boats, well, with some reshuffling of personnel, it worked out.

The baron was shorthanded by twenty-one men, and asked if we could help out, but Captain Odon said there were still thirty-four men on the sick list, and many of them would be capable of doing at least some work within a few days.

I could see that the baron wanted to say that taking care of the injured took up a lot of badly needed manpower, but I think he was still a little afraid of our captain, and kept silent.

A tall, straight tree on the west end of the island had been stripped of its branches. The base had been girdled so they couldn't grow back, and a big flag was nailed at the top, as a marker. It was agreed that the s.h.i.+p and the riverboats would meet back at this place in exactly three hundred sixty- five days.

It was decided that the captain would go with Father John and a platoon of men, and try to get to the headwaters of the Amazon, where there was supposed to be a gold-rich civilization.

I was to take my boat and search out the north side of the river, and Lezek was to take the south.

Kiejstut and Fritz were to accompany the captain farther west and would be a.s.signed to search and map some tributary.

We were to be friendly to the natives, to show them our products and see what they might have that would be of interest to us, but mostly we were to search for a rubber tree. This was described as having a white, sticky sap that, when dried, was stretchy, like raw pigskin.

Those men who had been logging on the island were apprehensive about finding a single kind of tree in that strange forest.

"G.o.d was feeling very creative when He made this place!" Fritz said. His hands were covered by a rash that he picked up on the island. "We must have cut down three or four hundred trees on that island, and I don't think that any two of them were of the same species. I tell you that every single tree, every single plant, was different from every other plant around it! These are not like the forests back home, where there might be only five kinds of trees and six kinds of bushes in ten miles of forest. We might have to search for years, and cut into thousands of trees before we find this rubber tree. And when we do, there won't be very many of them."

There was no way to answer that, so no one did.

Besides the rubber trees, we were each to try to set up five or six trading stations along the banks of the river. The natives would want our knives, we were told, if nothing else, and we would always be needing firewood for our steamboats.

We all began to realize that this would not be an easy mission to accomplish.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

From the Journal of Josip Sobieski WRITTEN MARCH 8, 1251, CONCERNING FEBRUARY 6, 1250.

THE RIVER we were on was called the Amazon, which meant, in Ancient Greek, "without a breast." It was named after a tribe of vaguely Greek warrior women. The story was that they were archers, and to keep their right b.r.e.a.s.t.s from interfering with their shooting, they cut them off. Or some said that they burned them off.

It was a gruesome story, that young women would so mutilate themselves, and a stupid one besides.

My mother and sisters are all good archers, and the women in my family have always been very well- endowed. None of them have ever noticed any difficulties with their b.r.e.a.s.t.s interfering with their shooting, and getting a nipple tw.a.n.ged by a bowstring would certainly be a noticeable event!

So why the biggest river in the world should be named after something that probably never happened, or shouldn't have happened if it did, was one of life's little mysteries, until the afternoon came for me to go out alone and try to meet some natives.

We soon found that it was hotter on the river than it had been at sea, but it wasn't impossibly hot.

The only problem was that it was hot all the time, without a break, which sometimes made it hard to fall asleep. The air had so much water in it that if anything got wet, it never seemed to get dry again, and we all had to learn to survive while being damp.

We soon discovered that on this river, humans did not always hold their normal, exalted position at the top of the food chain. A vast horde of disrespectful creatures were always out to displace us!