Chapter 219: The Yacht

“Thank you, but would you be so kind as to tell me what those windmills are? They stand one after another, like a forest.”

The captain looked doubtfully at the shimmering white surface of the sea, and it took him a long while to understand that the Count was referring to the direction of Cavite.

“That’s the Cavite fortress. Ah, no, you must mean the shipyard. The windmills were also built by the Japanese fellow, to pump water for the shipyard. You like them?”

“I do,” Weiss said. “In my youth, I had the good fortune to travel in the Canary Islands, which is the land of windmills. So this scene looks particularly familiar to me. What kind of person is this Japanese man you mentioned? I would like to meet him.”

“You won’t be able to see him. Although he is a secular person, his style is like that of a hermit or an ascetic. He sees no one except the Governor and the Archbishop. Even his beautiful fiancée, who went through so much hardship to come to Manila, probably doesn’t get to see him much—a truly pitiful beauty…” The captain’s mustache curled up ambiguously. “But the respected Commander Alfonso often has dealings with him. He can introduce you to him later.”

“Mr. Alfonso, that respectable person, was absent from our competition today.”

“He has a war to fight,” the captain’s words had a sour taste. “The Governor gave him four companies and a thousand natives to attack the Ilocanos of Pangasinan. That Japanese man also went with them, to take care of the cannons and rockets he made.”

Just as Weiss was about to follow Captain Pilar down from the gun platform, a distant and muffled gunshot seemed to be carried by the wind, followed by another.

“What’s going on?” Pilar raised his telescope. “It’s coming from Corregidor. Could it be a signal from the lighthouse ship?”

The two men took turns looking through the telescope. The sunlight reflecting off the sea was so intense that it was almost impossible to open their eyes. They could only vaguely see a few white sails shimmering on the horizon. After nearly an hour, Weiss saw a puff of smoke rise from the Cavite fortress, followed by the sound of a cannon.

“Damn it! A ship has entered the bay!” the captain cried, his hands on the crenellations. “Ring the alarm! To arms!”

The sentry rang the alarm bell. As the bell tolled, the company’s drummers began to beat a rapid assembly call. The gunners poured out of the barracks and ran to their positions. The infantry also put on their armor and began to form up. Weiss knew it was no longer appropriate to stay here. He went down the stairs. As soon as he left the fortress, he saw a frantic Don Basilio galloping over on his horse.

“I’ve sent people everywhere looking for you,” the port tax collector said breathlessly, taking off his hat to wipe his sweat without regard for his dignity. “By the Virgin Mary, look what your sailors have done! Your yacht will alarm His Excellency the Governor.”

“Mr. Don Basilio, I don’t need you to teach me how to speak to a nobleman!” Weiss replied haughtily. “What on earth has happened?”

Half an hour later, Weiss was sitting in a sampan, rowing towards the middle of the bay. The tax collector sat slumped next to the helmsman, rambling on about how a fast ship had ignored the warning of the Corregidor guard ship and entered Manila Bay, cruising around the harbor at an “astonishing speed.”

None of the patrol galleys or warships in the harbor could catch up to this ship. Finally, the sailors on board 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 sound of the rowers’ chants. The twin-masted yacht that had turned Manila Bay upside down gradually came into view, its elegant, slender black hull painted in a beautiful Victorian style. As the sampan drew closer, Weiss looked up and saw a familiar weapon in the high masthead, aimed at them—a Gatling gun.

On the bulwarks and the sterncastle, sailors with rifles were in position, controlling the surrounding sea and intimidating the native canoes from approaching.

The sailors lowered the gangway, and Weiss climbed up from the sampan. As he stepped on the last rung, a hand pulled him onto the deck.

“Welcome back!” said Xue Ziliang.

The Haiqi, or the Esmeralda as it had been newly named to deceive the Spanish, was originally a private yacht built for the wealthy Macanese Portuguese merchant Landeira by the Hong Kong shipyard. The ever-shrewd industrial sector never missed an opportunity to rip off its foreign clients, so Mr. Landeira’s order became an excellent testbed for the Baopu shipyard instead of the Hong Kong one. Someone even suggested building the yacht as a catamaran or trimaran. In the end, these overly sensational suggestions were rejected. The final design was basically derived from the 200-ton twin-masted patrol boat, using the mature iron-framed, wood-hulled structure. The displacement was slightly reduced, the length-to-beam ratio was increased, and bilge keels were installed to enhance stability. However, just as the hull was basically completed and the workers were nailing copper sheathing to the bottom, unfortunate news arrived: Mr. Landeira had gone bankrupt. One of his merchant ships had sunk after hitting a reef off the coast of Makassar, and another, loaded with precious sandalwood from Timor, had become a prize of the Dutch.

Naturally, the bankrupt Mr. Landeira could not pay the remaining forty percent of the final payment, and the nearly completed yacht became the property of the Planning and Development Council.

After much wrangling with the Agriculture Committee, the Special Reconnaissance Team, and the Long-Range Exploration Team, the Navy finally got the ship it wanted for sail training, on the condition that it must be available at all times to transport VIPs and important materials as ordered by the Executive Committee. The Hong Kong shipyard carried out numerous modifications, large and small, according to the Navy’s requirements. To familiarize the naval cadets with different sail plans, the original design of a two-masted schooner eventually evolved into what Qian Shuiting called a “brigantine,” with square sails on the foremast and fore-and-aft sails on the mainmast. After many twists and turns, the yacht-turned-sail-training-ship Haiqi was commissioned into the Navy at the Hong Kong base. No one at the time could have imagined that it would later change its identity and become the private yacht Esmeralda of the Count of Fannanuova, playing a role in an operation jointly led by the intelligence department.

“Don’t take the ship into that stinking ditch of the Pasig River,” Weiss said.

The Esmeralda dropped anchor near the shore of Tondo, keeping a cautious distance from the cannons of Fort Santiago that fired red-hot shot. Tondo, which in another time would be the largest and most densely populated slum in the Philippines, was now just an inconspicuous small village on the north bank of the Pasig River. Although sparsely populated, the beautiful yacht was quite an eye-catcher. A dozen canoes loaded with goods gradually gathered around, and the dark-skinned natives waved their arms, shouting in various incomprehensible languages, trying to sell pineapples, bananas, mangoes, and taro to the crew. The sailors on the yacht, however, remained unmoved, merely pointing their black muzzles at anyone who tried to get too close. Using the opportunity of selling goods to board and rob ships was a common tactic of Malay pirates, and both Chinese and European merchant ships had suffered from it.

The captain of the patrol ship stood on the wooden thwart at the top of the small sampan, his body leaning so far forward that it seemed he would fall into the water with a single stumble. Yet he remained steady in this position, staring at the approaching Esmeralda.

In the eyes of an old Basque sailor who had sailed half the globe, the slender, barracuda-like fast sailing yacht was a rare beauty. Not only were its proportions perfect, but every detail of the ship was exquisitely and symmetrically made.

After chasing away the native canoes, the three-oared patrol ship furled its oars and faced the yacht head-on, stopping two cable lengths away. Before getting into the sampan, the captain had ordered the cannons on the forecastle to be ready for battle and the swivel guns on both sides to be loaded with ammunition, ready to fire at any moment. But his orders were in vain. Except for the rowers below deck, all the sailors and soldiers, both on and off duty, had crowded onto the forecastle and sterncastle, and even climbed the furled masts to get a look at this strange, high-masted, narrow-bodied sailing ship they had never seen before.

“A rabble,” Xue Ziliang said, nodding his chin towards the crowded forecastle of the galley. A Tagalog sailor was straddling the sharp iron ram at the bow, pointlessly waving a linstock. The cannon he was supposed to fire was several meters behind him, and the muzzle was blocked by a crowd of people. “If we just turn the Gatling gun on them, a few long bursts, and this poor wreck will become a floating coffin. Those idiots won’t even have time to fart.”

The sampan came alongside the yacht with a few soft thuds. The captain of the patrol ship grabbed the rope ladder on the side and leaped onto the deck in a few steps, completely ignoring the two fat port officials who had come with him and were still struggling on the ladder until they were pulled aboard by the yacht’s sailors. The captain was puzzled. The lines of this yacht were different from any he had seen before, long and smooth, without high superstructures, a conspicuous figurehead, or the usual elaborate carvings that extended from the sides to the sterncastle. All he saw were neatly coiled ropes, some unfamiliar machinery, and a teak deck that reflected his image.

After taking two steps forward, he immediately understood why the deck was so shiny. A team of barefoot sailors, obviously Chinese, were following a moving hose, scrubbing the deck. Then they sprinkled sand on it and, kneeling on the deck, vigorously polished it with stones. These Chinese were completely different from their lethargic and sloppy compatriots on the junks. They wore clean blue uniforms, their collars turned down over their shoulders and backs like the Dutch, and short stubble showed from under their round-brimmed straw hats with white bands. They were energetic but spoke little, moving in unison to the boatswain’s whistle.

This scene couldn’t help but make the captain recall his days as a midshipman. He didn’t notice the position of the scuppers by the bulwark. The seawater sprayed from the hose washed over the deck and reached his boots before he realized it. He hastily jumped aside to avoid the dirty water, only to bump into someone.