At that moment the character of the voyage changed. Three hundred miles separated them from the point of Mariveles at the entrance to Manila Bay, and it would all be coastal sailing, which meant contending with weak and fickle winds, and taking frequent soundings, and dropping anchor at night lest they run aground on some unseeable hazard in the dark. Some days they made no progress whatever, owing to contrary winds—by day, they traded with locals for fresh fruit and meat brought out in long dual-outrigger boats, and by night they patrolled Minerva's decks with loaded blunderbusses, waiting for those same locals to steal out in the same boats and creep over the gunwales with knives in their teeth.
At any rate, ten days of this sort of travel brought them, late one afternoon, to the point of Mariveles, where several rocks projected from the surf like daggers. The garrison on the nearby island of Corregidor caught sight of Minerva around sunset and lit some fires to prevent her from running aground. By triangulating against these they were able to bring the ship gingerly around the south side of the island and drop anchor in the bay there. The next morning the Spanish ensign in command of the garrison came out on a longboat for an hour's visit; they knew him thoroughly, as Minerva had passed this way a dozen or so times on her triangular voyages among Manila, Macao, and Queena-Kootah. He gave them the latest jokes and gossip from Manila and they gave him some packets of spices and a few trinkets they'd picked up in Japan.
They weighed anchor and sailed across Manila Bay. The Spanish castle on the point of Cavite came into view first, and later they could make out, beyond it, the bell-towers and fortifications of Manila, and a thicket of masts and spars, shot through with furling silk banners, around the outlet of the Pasig River. It was the expectation of most aboard that they would make direct for there. But as they weathered the point of Cavite and entered into calmer water in the lee of the castle, van Hoek ordered most of the sails taken in. A banca—a sort of longboat hewn from the trunk of a single colossal tree—came toward them, and as it drew closer, Jack was able to recognize Moseh and Surendranath, who had stayed behind to settle some business affairs, and Jimmy and Danny, who had been acting as their bodyguards. One by one these men clambered up the pilot's ladder and joined their brethren on the upperdeck. Moseh and Surendranath went back into van Hoek's wardroom to confer with the captain and the other chief men of the enterprise. Jack could have participated in this meeting but declined to because he could tell from the look on Moseh's face that it had all gone more or less well, and that their next voyage would be eastbound.
This was the innermost harbor of Manila Bay: a hammock-shaped anchorage slung between two points of land several miles apart, each of which had been built up into a fortress by the Spaniards, or rather by their Tagalian minions, during the century and a half that they had held sway over these islands. The closer of the two forts, just off their starboard, was Cavite: a conventional square, four-bastioned castle thrust out into the water on a slender neck of land, so that the bay served as its moat. A ditch had been dug across that neck so that the landward approach could be controlled by a drawbridge. This ditch was situated at some distance from the castle proper, and the intervening space had been covered with buildings: a crowd of cane houses with more substantial wood-frame dwellings rising out of it from place to place, and three stone churches that had been erected, or were being erected, by various Popish religious orders.
The opposite end of the harbor was the city of Manila proper. The Spaniards had taken a small peninsula framed on one side by the Bay and on two others by rivers: the Pasig, and a welter of pissant tributaries that joined the Pasig just short of where it emptied into the Bay. They had enclosed this peninsula in a modern sort of slope-sided wall, a couple of miles in circuit, and erected noble bulwarks and demilunes at its corners, rendering it impregnable to land assault by Dutch, Chinese, or native legions. The outlet of the Pasig was dominated by a considerable fortress whose guns commanded the river, the Bay, and certain troublesome ethnic barangays across the river.
From this point of view—or any point of view, for that matter—it did not look like a fabled citadel of inconceivable wealth. If the Spaniards had built Manila anywhere else, her church-spires and watch-towers would have reached into the clouds. As it was, even the noblest buildings hugged the ground and had a stoop-shouldered look about them, because they had learned the hard way that anything more than two storeys high, and built of stone, would be brought down by an earthquake while the mortar was scarcely dry. So as Jack stood there on Minerva's deck he perceived Manila as something very dark, low, and heavy, and overlaid with smoke and humidity, softened only a little by the high coconut palms that lined her shore.
This was just the sort of weather that culminated in a bracing thunder-shower—a fact Minerva's crew knew well, for Manila had been their home port for most of the three years since the ship had made her maiden voyage out of Malabar, and at any rate half the crew had grown up along the shores of this bay. They also knew that this bay offered no protection from north winds, and that a big ship like Minerva would be cast away if she were caught between Cavite and Manila when the wind shifted round that way; she would run a-ground in the shallows and fall prey to Tagalians who would come out in their tree-trunk boats and Chinese sangley s who would come out in their sampans to salvage her. So instead of being boisterous, as one might reasonably expect of sailors who'd just made a perilous and improbable voyage to Japan and back, they were solemn as monks on Sunday, and angrily shushed anyone who raised his voice. Malabaris had suspended themselves in the ratlines like spiders in webs and were hanging there motionless with eyes half closed and mouths half open, waiting for meaningful stirrings in the air.
The sky and air were all white, and of a uniform brightness, so that it was impossible to get even a general notion of where the sun might be. According to the hour-glasses they used to keep track of watches, it must be an hour or so before sunset. The whole bay was as still and hushed as Minerva's upperdeck; the only noise, therefore, came from the vast shipyard that spread along the shore below the sullen arsenal of Cavite. There five hundred Filipino slaves were at work under the whips and guns of helmeted Spaniards, constructing the largest ship Jack had ever seen. Which, considering the places he had been, meant that it was very likely the largest ship the world had seen since Noah's Ark had run a-ground on a mountain-top and been broken up for firewood.
Piled on the shore in pyramids were the stripped boles of giant trees that these Filipinos, or others in the same predicament, had cut down in the bat-infested jungles that crowded in along the shores of Laguna de Bay (a great lake just inland of Manila) and floated in rafts down the Pasig. Some of the workers were cutting these into beams and planks. But the great ship was close to being finished and so the demand for huge timbers was not what it had been months ago when the keel and frames had stood out like stiff fingers against the sky. Most of the laborers were concerned with finer matters now: making cables (indeed, Manila made the finest cordage in the world), caulking joints between hull-planks, and doing finish carpentry on the cabins where the most ambitious merchants of the South Seas would dwell for most of the next year, or drown within weeks, depending on how it went.
"Dad, either my eyes play tricks, or else you've finally traded in that Mahometan spadroon for proper armaments," said Daniel Shaftoe, eyeing the katana and wakizashi of Gabriel Goto, thrust into Jack's belt.