“Midst of the typhoon season,” I cut in with purposeful superciliousness of tone.
The captain of a clipper is as sensitive to any aspersions on his seamanship as the grayest master of navigation in the navy. Downing bit snappily. “Typhoon be damned! I navigated a whaler through uncharted seas twenty odd years, and never lost my ship. I’ll take the Sea Flight through Van Diemen Strait, blow or calm, sir.”
“No doubt,” I murmured with ambiguous suavity.
He scowled, puzzled at my smile. “You naval officers! Commanded my first ship before you were born—before I had need of a razor. What’s more, I’m third owner in this clipper, and I’ve discretion over my course. The skipper who carries the first cargo out of a Japanese port is going to get the cream, and I’ve an idee the Japs are loosening up a bit. I’m going to put into Kagoshima Bay, where the old Morrison tried to land the castaway Japs in ’thirty-seven.”
“She was fired upon most savagely by the soldiers of the Prince of Satsuma,” I replied. “Why not try Nagasaki?”
“Nagasaki?—Deshima!” he rumbled. “I’m no Dutchman or yellow Chinee, to be treated like a dog. What’s more, it’s too far up the west coast. No! I’ll chance Kagoshima. That Satsuma king or mandarin, whatever he is, may have changed his mind since the Morrison, or there may be a new one now, with more liberal idees.”
“Since you’re resolved upon it, skipper, I must confess I have reasons of my own to be pleased with your plan,” I said, and at his interested glance, I told him somewhat in detail of my daring ancestor Will Adams, the first Englishman ever to reach the Land of the Rising Sun and the only European ever made a Japanese noble.
“H’m. Married a Japanese wife, and left children by her,” commented Downing, and he grinned broadly. “I must ask leave for you to land and look up your heathen kin.”
“You forget yourself, sir,” I caught him up. “Be kind enough hereafter to refrain from impertinence when speaking of persons related to me.”
He stared in astonishment. “Well, I’ll be durned! Two hundred years and more since your forefather died, you said—”