"And what about the Discovery? I want to see her too."
"That you will, sir. She's in our shipyard down at Deptford. Might be well if I just had Huyghen see you there. By all means look her over." He beamed. "And a lovelier sight you're ne'er like to meet." Then, remembering himself, he quickly turned aside. "Unless, of course, 'twould be my Margaret here." . . .
As agreed, Hawksworth was taken to Deptford the next day, the Company's carriage inching through London's teeming streets for what seemed a lifetime. His first sight of the shipyard was a confused tangle of planking, ropes, and workmen, but he knew at a glance the Discovery was destined to be handsome. The keel had been laid weeks before, and he could already tell her fo'c'sle would be low and rakish. She was a hundred and thirty feet from the red lion of her beakhead to the taffrail at her stern—where gilding already was being applied to the ornate quarter galleries. She was five hundred tons burden, each ton some six hundred cubic feet of cargo space, and she would carry a hundred and twenty men when fully crewed. Over her swarmed an army of carpenters, painters, coopers, riggers, and joiners, while skilled artisans were busy attaching newly gilded sculptures to her bow and stern.
That day they were completing the installation of the hull chain-plates that would secure deadeyes for the shrouds, and he moved closer to watch. Stories had circulated the docks that less than a month into the Company's last voyage the mainmast yard of a vessel had split, and the shipbuilder, William Benten, and his foreman, Edward Chandler, had narrowly escaped charges of lining their pockets by substituting cheap, uncured wood.
He noticed that barrels of beer had been stationed around the yard for the workmen, to blunt the lure of nearby alehouses, and as he stood watching he saw Chandler seize a grizzled old bystander who had helped himself to a tot of beer and begin forcibly evicting him from the yard. As they passed, he heard the old man—clad in a worn leather jerkin, his face ravaged by decades of salt wind and hard drink— reviling the Company.
"What does the rottin' East India Company know o' the Indies. You'll ne'er double the Cape in that pissin' shallop. 'Twould scarce serve to ferry the Thames." The old man struggled weakly to loosen Chandler's grasp on his jerkin. "But I can tell you th' Portugals've got carracks that'll do it full easy, thousand-ton bottoms that'd hold this skiff in the orlop deck and leave air for a hundred barrel o' biscuit. An' I've shipped 'em. By all the saints, where's the man standin' that knows the Indies better?"
Hawksworth realized he must be Huyghen. He intercepted him at the edge of the yard and invited him to a tavern, but the old Englishman-turned-Dutchman bitterly declined.
"I'll ha' none o' your fancy taverns, lad, aswarm wi' pox-faced gentry fingerin' their meat pies. They'll ne'er take in the likes o' me." Then he examined Hawksworth and flashed a toothless grin. "But there's an alehouse right down the way where a man wi' salt in his veins can still taste a drop in peace."
They went and Hawksworth had ordered the first round. When the tankards arrived, Huyghen attacked his thirstily, maintaining a cynical silence as Hawksworth began describing the Company's planned voyage, then asked him what he knew of the passage east and north of the Cape. As soon as his first tankard was dry, the old man spoke.
"Aye, I made the passage once, wi' Portugals. Back in'83. To Goa. An' I've been to the Indies many a time since, wi' Dutchmen. But ne'er again to that pissin' sinkhole."