Quicksilver

“But will Teach not anticipate all of this, and take pains to keep his fleet together?”

“In a well-disciplined fleet, pursuing Victory, that’s how it would go. But that is a pirate-fleet, in pursuit of plunder, and by the rules and account-books of piracy, the lion’s share goes to the ship that takes the prize.”

“Ah-so the captain of each ship has incentive to split away and attack us individually.”

“Just so, Dr. Waterhouse.”

“But would it not be foolhardy for a little sloop to engage a ship with all-this?” Daniel gestures down the length of the gundeck-a bustling bazaar where ca

“Not if the ship is underma

“Beg pardon? Tidy? Yes, I suppose, as ships go…” says Dr. Waterhouse, finding Dappa, sometimes, too subtle-an excess of quicksilver in the constitution.

“Thank you, sir. But ’Tis a disadvantage, when we have to fight with blunderbusses. The virtue of a blunderbuss, as you may know, is to make a weapon out of whatever nails, pebbles, splinters, and fragments might be lying about-but here on Minerva we make a practice of sweeping that matter up, and throwing it overboard, several times daily. At times like this we do regret that we neglected to hoard it.”

“I know more than you imagine of blunderbusses. What do you want me to do?”

“In a little while, one of the men’ll be teaching you how to fuze mortar-bombs-but we’re not quite ready for that just yet-now I would ask you to go down into the hold and-”

Dr. Waterhouse doesn’t believe, until he’s down there, what Dappa tells him next. He hasn’t seen the hold yet, and reckons it’ll be like the shambolic Repository at the Royal Society-but no. The great casks and bales are stacked, and lashed in place, with admirable neatness, and there is even a Diagram tacked to the staircase bulkhead in which the location of each object is specified, and notes made as to what’s stored there and when it was done. Underneath, under a subheading labelledbilge, van Hoek himself has scratched “out-moded china-keep handy.”

Dappa has pulled two sailors away from what they’ve been doing the last half-hour: standing by a gunport carrying on a learned discourse about an approaching pirate-sloop. The sailors considered this to be time well spent, but Dappa felt otherwise. These two spend a minute consulting the Diagram, and Daniel realizes with moderate astonishment that they both know how to read, and interpret figures. They agree that the out-moded china is to be found forward, and so that’s where they go-to the most beautiful part of the ship, where many ribs radiate from the up-curving keel, forming an upside-down vault, so it’s like being a fly exploring the ceiling of a cathedral. The sailors move a few crates out of the way-they never stop talking, each trying to outdo the other in bloodcurdling yarns about the cruelty of certain infamous pirates. They pull up a hatch that gives access to the bilge, and in no time at all two crates of markedly ugly china have been fetched out. The crates themselves are handsome productions of clear-grained red cedar, chosen because it won’t rot in the wet bilge. Into them the china has been thrown with no packing material between items, so part of Daniel’s work is already done. He thanks the two sailors and they look back at him queerly, then return abovedecks. Daniel spreads an old hammock-two yards of sailcloth-on the planking, tips a crate over, and then attacks its spilled contents with a maul.

What is the optimal size (he wonders) of a shard of pottery for firing out of a blunderbuss? When the King’s guards shot him before his father’s house during the Fire, he was knocked down, bruised, cut, but not really penetrated. Probably the larger the better, which makes his job easier-one would like to see great sharp triangles of gaudily-painted porcelain spi

The Inquisitive Jesuit RICCIOLI has taken great pains by 77 Arguments to overthrow the Copernican Hypothesis… I believe this one Discovery will answer them, and 77 more, if so many can be thought of and produced against it.

–ROBERTHOOKE

DANIEL SPENT A GOOD PARTof two months on the roof of Gresham’s College, working on a hole-making, not mending, one. Hooke could not do it because his vertigo had been acting up, and if it struck while he was on top of the College, he would plunge to the ground like a wormy apple from a tree, his Last Experiment a study into the mysterious power of Gravitation.

For a man who claimed to hate the appearance of sharp things when viewed under a microscope, Hooke spent a great deal of time honing jabs at Inquisitive Jesuits. While Daniel was up on the roof making the hole, and a rain-hatch to cover it, Hooke was safe at ground level, ru

The Inquisitive Jesuit Riccioli had pointed out that if the heavens were sown with stars, some near and some far, and if the Earth were looping round the Sun in a vast ellipse, then the positions of those stars with respect to one another should shift during the course of the year, as trees in a forest changed their relative positions in the eyes of a traveler moving past. But no such parallax had been observed, which proved (to Riccioli, anyway) that the Earth must be fixed in the center of the Universe. To Hooke it only proved that good enough telescopes hadn’t been built, nor precise enough measurements made. To obtain the level of magnification he needed, he had to construct a telescope 32 feet long. To a