Shanghai, Two Ships

The first thing they saw was the masts.

Hundreds of masts stood like a forest, crowding both banks of the river. Between them poked up the heads of many black funnels, and smoke streamed in strand after strand across the sky.

Around the 18th day of the 5th month, in the 3rd year of Bunkyu (1863). The Chelswick came up the Huangpu River into Shanghai.

Inoue Monta gripped the deck rail and could not make a sound.

Warships. British, French, American. Ships lined with rows of cannon floated here, and there, and there. He tried to count them and gave up partway. No fewer than 100. And merchantmen and steamers, many times that number again.

The foreign ships that had floated off Yokohama were no more than a scrap at the edge of this scene.

"Monta-san."

Beside him, Shunsuke spoke in a small voice.

"Are those all foreign ships?"

Monta didn't answer. He couldn't answer.

◇

Along the bank, stone buildings stood in a row like a wall. Three stories, four stories, square and straight. From every one of them, a foreign flag was flying.

This was supposed to be the land of the Qing. The land of that great empire Japan had taken as its model for more than a thousand years.

And yet those walking along the bank were foreign merchants, foreign soldiers, and the Qing laborers who ran carrying their loads. The laborers were drenched in sweat, barefoot, backs bent, driven on by the shouts of the foreign men.

In the early afternoon, Monta and Shunsuke went for a walk along the street by the bank, just the two of them.

Carriages raced over the cobbled road. Riding in them were foreign men and women, nothing else. At the roadside, Qing peddlers were desperately raising their voices at foreign customers.

Turning a corner, the two of them stopped.

A foreign soldier was beating a Qing laborer who had been pulling a handcart, thrashing him with a stick. The load had blocked the road, it seemed. The laborer pressed his forehead to the ground and bowed his head again and again. Of all the Qing people passing along the street, not one stopped. They pretended not to see and hurried by.

Shunsuke began, without thinking, to take a step forward. Monta caught his arm.

"Don't."

"But..."

"What can we do?"

Monta's fingers dug into Shunsuke's arm. He could tell those fingers were trembling.

The town was overflowing with foreign soldiers. Over the past few years, rebel armies had repeatedly closed in on Shanghai, and each time foreign troops had defended the town, a man from the trading company had told them. Their own country's town, defended not by their own country's soldiers but by foreign ones.

So this was what it meant for a country to be weak.

The two went back to the ship without a word.

The trading company had put the five up on one of its own ships moored in the harbor. That night, the five gathered in a cabin on board.

For a long time, no one spoke. Even after dark, the shouts of the stevedores and the sound of steam came in from outside the window.

The first to speak was Monta.

"Joi is finished."

The other four all looked at Monta at once.

"You saw how many ships there were. If they came at us in earnest, forget Choshu: if we scraped together every battery in Japan, we wouldn't last a day. Look at the Qing. A country that big, and the foreigners do as they please in its own harbors."

Monta's voice was hoarse.

"I set the fire at Gotenyama. I thought that would scare the foreigners into leaving. What arrogance. It didn't do as much as a mosquito landing on an elephant's foot."

"Monta-san..."

"We have to open the country. Open it, and build up as much strength as they have. There's no other way for Japan to keep from going the way of the Qing."

Monta struck his knee with his fist.

"I'd like to go straight home and tell the lot of them back in the domain."

"You mustn't."

It was Yozo who said it, quietly.

"If you went back now, all you could tell them is 'I saw the ships in Shanghai.' Anyone can count ships. What we have to bring back is how those ships are made."

Monta glared at Yozo for a while. Then, all at once, the tension went out of his shoulders.

"...You're right. We came to become machines."

◇

The next day, the five called on the Shanghai branch of Jardine Matheson.

The man in charge of the branch was an affable Englishman. There was no interpreter. Their English was nothing but the scraps they had picked up on the Yokohama wharf.

The man asked, slowly, in English like you would use to a child.

What did they want to study in England?

Of the five, the one who answered on the spot was Monta. Monta wanted to say he wanted to study the navy. The learning that would let them build warships, sail them, and defend the country. He searched desperately in his head for the English word for that "navy."

"Nevigation."

That was the word that came out of his mouth.

The man nodded with a broad smile.

"Navigation. I see, seamanship."

It was a slip of the tongue. But Monta did not realize it. Only Yakichi, for a fraction of a second, seemed about to say something and then shut his mouth. The other man was nodding contentedly and already writing something in his ledger. And none of them could think of the English to correct it now.

If they wanted to learn seamanship, best to learn it in practice, aboard ship. The English manager must have thought so, meaning it as a kindness.

◇

The five were to split up between two ships.

The Pegasus, sailing first, was a small sailing ship of 525 tons, and there was room for only two. It was settled that Monta and Shunsuke would go aboard her. The other three would follow some 10 days later on the White Adder.

On the morning of sailing, the five faced one another on the wharf.

"See you in London."

Monta said.

"It's a race to see who gets there first, eh."

Shunsuke laughed. He laughed, but inside his kimono his hand was gripping the melted glass.

Kinsuke bowed to the two of them without a word. Yozo laid a hand once on each of their shoulders.

Yakichi started to say something, then stopped. For some reason, he couldn't get the manager's face out of his head, the way he had nodded at "navigation."

◇

On their second day out on the open sea, Monta and Shunsuke found out that they were not passengers.

"Oi, Johnny!"

They were shouted awake while it was still dark. It didn't take them long to work out that "Johnny" was a name used to sneer at Japanese.

Their bunks were in a corner of the sailors' quarters in the bottom of the ship. There was no passenger cabin anywhere.

What they were handed was a stone for scouring the deck, a scrubbing brush, and a bucket.

"Monta-san, what's this?"

"I don't know. I don't know, but I suppose it means do it."

The two scoured the deck as they were told. They hauled on the sheets, carried barrels, and washed the plates the sailors had left. Their food was nothing but biscuit hard as stone and salty dried meat. The water grew cloudier in the barrel day by day.

Even so, Shunsuke was not one to fall without picking something up.

Among the sailors was a boy of 14 or 15. The lowest of the low, and the one worked hardest. Scouring the deck side by side with that boy, Shunsuke pointed at everything he laid hands on, one after another.

"This?"

"Brush."

"This?"

"Bucket."

"This?"

"Rope."

At first the boy found it a nuisance. But when he saw Shunsuke repeat each one under his breath and have it properly memorized by the next day, he began to enjoy it, and started teaching him the names of the sails, the ways of talking about the weather, even what the sailors' insults meant.

At night, in his bunk at the bottom of the ship, Shunsuke wrote down the words he had learned that day on a scrap of board with a piece of charcoal. Monta watched out of the corner of his eye and laughed, half in disbelief.

"You learn wherever you are, don't you."

A young man who has come to learn seamanship should first be taught a sailor's work. That was what the message the captain had received meant. It was only much later that the two of them realized it.

◇

The worst trouble was relieving themselves.

The ship's privy was a crossbeam that stuck out over the sea from the ship's side. You straddled it and did your business holding on. Right below was the sea. When the waves were rough, the spray slapped your backside.

After about 2 weeks, Shunsuke's stomach turned.

It was terrible diarrhea. He ran a fever too. Many times a day, he had to crawl to the ship's side. His face went the color of earth, and his legs wobbled.

That night, the sea turned rough.

The ship heeled hard, and waves washed over the deck. Shunsuke clutched his belly and got to his feet again.

"Shunsuke, wait."

Monta had brought a length of rope from somewhere. He wound it round and round Shunsuke's waist and tied the other end around his own wrist.

"What are you doing?"

"If you fall, I'll pull you up."

"Monta-san, you can't..."

"Shut up and go. If you fall in the sea and die out here, what will they say about you back in Hagi? 'On his way to England, he fell off the privy and died,' that's what."

Shunsuke burst out laughing in spite of himself. The moment he did, his stomach cramped again and he winced.

At the dark ship's side, Shunsuke held on to the crossbeam. Monta braced his feet at the foot of the mast and gripped the rope. Every time a wave came, the rope snapped taut. Every time, Monta gritted his teeth and pulled.

In the sky, stars he had never seen before were lined up.

"Monta-san."

Shunsuke's hoarse voice came from the ship's side.

"What?"

"We're samurai, aren't we?"

"Yeah."

"Samurai, made to scrub decks by foreigners, sticking our backsides out over the sea, tied together with rope."

"So we are."

"...It's funny, isn't it."

Monta stayed silent for a while, still gripping the rope.

"It's funny."

Then he spoke in a low voice.

"But you know, Shunsuke. I feel like I'm doing something a lot better now than when I set that fire at Gotenyama."

A wave shook the ship again. Monta pulled on the rope.

◇

Around the same time, on the White Adder, which had left Shanghai 10 days later, the other three were making an entirely different voyage.

She was a fast sailing ship built to carry tea, and the three had been given a small cabin as passengers. They took their meals at the same table as the captain.

At first Kinsuke was so seasick he could hardly get up, but in time he got used to it and took to reading books on deck.

Yozo never left the ship's carpenter's side. The way his hands spliced a split yard, the sound of his hammer driving iron fittings home. Even without words in common, you could understand the movement of hands by watching. Yozo drew diagrams in his notebook and wrote in the measurements. At first the carpenter found it creepy, but in time he came to enjoy it, and began deliberately working slowly so Yozo could see.

At night, Yakichi went up on deck.

The mate was measuring the height of the stars with a sextant. Yakichi stood beside him and begged with gestures. The mate cocked his head, but when Yakichi showed him he could hold the sextant correctly, his eyes went round and he laughed.

From then on, the two measured the stars together every night.

Yakichi saw the Southern Cross for the first time on this ship.

It's us who are really learning seamanship, Yakichi thought suddenly, gazing up at the stars. How were the two who had gone ahead getting on now?

◇

The ships rounded the southern tip of Africa.

The sea off the Cape of Good Hope was as rough as the rumors said. Waves like mountains lifted the little ship and flung it down to the bottom of the trough. Down in the bottom of the Pegasus, Shunsuke and Monta lashed each other to a pillar with rope and waited for the storm to pass.

Then north, across the Atlantic.

They crossed the equator; it grew cold again, and the fog thickened.

More than 4 months since they had left Yokohama.

One morning on deck, Monta noticed that the smell of the air had changed.

Something else was mixed in with the smell of the sea. A heavy, scorched smell that clung to the back of the nose.

Coal smoke.

Beyond the fog, a shore came dimly into view. On both banks of the river, warehouses and chimneys and more chimneys went on and on. Countless chimneys, many times more than in Shanghai. Every one of them was belching black smoke into the sky.

It was the Thames.

"Shunsuke, get up."

Monta ran down into the bottom of the ship and shook the shoulder of Shunsuke, still gaunt and wasted.

"We're here. It's London."