Chapter 22

I was surprised at how eager the sailors were to return to Port Tampico, but dreams of wealth and beautiful women drew them back. Two days after the last seven ships had arrived in Rouen, ten ships were ready to return. The only thing extra Parker had asked for with the last fleet of ships to return was a priest. Many of the men wanted a religious service to formalize their marriages. I sent one Anglican and one Catholic priest after warning them that they would be there for many years. In addition to the ten ships, I sent the four newest ships to come from the New Aragon shipyard. Shipwrights from our lands and allies in every corner of the world had compared notes and ideas before deciding on a slightly modified version of the Chinese Junk Xun used. I’d always assumed that he had a small fleet of ships that he used for trading and was shocked to learn that he got all the cargo on one huge ship.

I didn’t understand half of what the shipbuilders were patiently explaining to me. I only heard that the ships were designed to handle better in the heavy storms frequently experienced along the route from China to Africa. That was good, considering the original storm that drove our ships to the new land. The sails were adjustable to make better use of the heavy storm winds, or for sailing into the wind. Strange contraptions on the sides of the ship helped keep the wind from blowing them sideways as well as helping them sail faster into the wind. Two brass machines could be used to pump water out of the ships if necessary or to pump fresh water from rivers to the ship to refill water barrels. I liked the new pumps (new to us but not the Chinese) well enough that we had hundreds of them made to pump water from rivers and streams up to towns elevated above the water source, so water no longer had to be hand-carried.

The inside of the new ships was also different. There were even rooms for the sailors and for any passengers so I wouldn’t have to appropriate the Captain’s quarters when the women and I sailed. They included a deck for the cannons right below the top deck, keeping them out of the weather. Three cannons were on each side of the ship, two more aimed forward, and two aimed aft to discourage any ship chasing them.

Oh, and the ships had six masts, one of which could be raised or lowered, compared to the usual one or two masts our older ships had. They strengthened the masts, making them bigger in diameter near the base and used teak wood imported from Asia to make the hulls and deck and then covered the hulls with thin copper plating like Parker had asked. Even though many sailors from other countries snickered at the ships, I’d been on Xun’s ship, and it sailed faster and smoother than the style we normally used.

Three more ships identical to them were under construction, as well as six ships each designed mainly for carrying a thousand horses. They could be re-configured to carry cargo, passengers, or other livestock, but would be used mainly for transporting horses to Africa and now Port Tampico. Xun had purchased (with my money) a slightly smaller ship a couple of years ago and had it brought through the canal and to New Aragon to train our sailors and officers since it handled so differently from our customary ships.

Led by the Tampico, my new flagship for trading with Westland, the fourteen ships sailed with a cargo destined largely for Port Tampico. The ships carried carpenters, stonemasons, stonecutters, miners, cattle, pigs, and chickens. The livestock was from Granada and North Africa, so they were already used to hot weather. The cargo included another five hundred mounted archers, the same number of horses for Ocanizl, swords and crossbows for Ames, five thousand Welsh bows, two hundred thousand silk bowstrings, and four hundred thousand sheaves of arrows. There were four wagons with ammo for the cannons and six pyrotechnic wagons aboard each ship. I included a message to Parker explaining that five hundred horses were my gift to Ocanizl for being such a good ally.

Parker had asked for men to turn lead ingots into thin sheeting to cover the hulls of their ships. That would eliminate the necessity to constantly careen the ships and coat the hull to protect them from the barnacles and wood-eating worms abundant in the warm, tropical waters. One of the students from the university had told Parker about the Romans doing the same thing long ago.

In addition to that cargo, there was still plenty of room for trade goods, and we filled every inch of the ships. My promise to Parker was that the next group of ships would have more trade goods and less equipment. Six weeks after the eight ships returned here, and four weeks after the seven ships arrived, ten ships loaded with trade goods sailed for Tampico. They carried weapons and iron goods to trade, and iron and steel ingots for the Tampico blacksmiths to use until they could find iron ore there.

The next shipment from Tampico arrived five months after the second group of ships left. The search for iron ore had turned up everything but. To date they had three more silver mines, two copper mines, a lead mine, a zinc mine, and a gold mine, and the cargo aboard the ships reflected it. There were updated maps, and more sketches of newly discovered islands, coastlines, and villages, and even one of the rapidly growing city of Port Tampico. The ships returning to Rouen weren’t all full, but Parker returned them knowing that we needed them to continue supplying Africa.

In addition, Parker forwarded a request from Qitzactl, the emperor of the Totonac Kingdom south of Tampico. When three of our ships stopped at a major Totonac village along the coast, they had asked the men to wait so their Emperor could come to personally greet the new strangers whose presence had been announced across the land for over a year now, and whose exploits had rapidly become legend.

The men waited, trading some of their cargo to natives from neighboring villages who had hurried there upon learning that the much whispered about, light-skinned traders had stopped there. The villagers brought the valuables they now knew these strangers sought in trade for the wondrous goods they brought. To make the goods more accessible to the villagers, we began accepting and using cacao beans, animal pelts, and feathers as currency in addition to the gems, pearls, jade, gold, and silver we had originally sought.

Word of our alliance with the Huastec and of our quick and crushing defeat of the Xi’ui had spread quickly. When Emperor Qitzactl arrived a few days later, he asked Captain Groene, commander of the small flotilla, if he might be permitted to ally Totonicapán with us. Not knowing what the relationship between the Huastec and Totonac was or could be, Groene explained that he didn’t have the authority to make that decision but promised to forward the request on to his ruler.

To entice them to return with more goods to trade, and hopefully to accept his offer to become allies, Qitzactl gave them a tract of land larger than Port Tampico where they could build a fort and trading post and plow fields to grow crops. It was located on a narrow stretch of coast near where several rivers formed dozens of lagoons before entering the sea. In honor of the odd bean pod (vanilla) harvested in the area by the Totonac, Groene named the new post Port Tlilxochitl, and promised Qitzactl that they would send settlers back soon to build a port.

Qitzactl and the advisors he brought with him spent the better part of his two-day stay querying each member of the expedition about their ruler. Fortunately, the members of the trading expedition had a few of their native wives with them to explain my complicated list of titles under three different rulers, as well as being a ruler in my own right. When asked, the men explained about my military exploits and why I had engaged in each. He was quite interested in why we built stone houses even for the slaves.

Groene explained that, in general, I was against slavery except for defeated enemies. While I did buy slaves, I usually freed them after eight years. When we bought slaves, we treated them more like servants than slaves, and on the one occasion that we sold slaves, they were defeated enemies we wanted to make an example of.

Then he asked Qitzactl if his people raised any animals. When Qitzactl answered that they did, Groene asked if they provided food and shelter to keep their animals safe. Again, Qitzactl said they did.

“Surely your slaves are more valuable than your animals?” Groene questioned, a question Qitzactl was still pondering when they left to return to Cempoala, his capital.

Carefully noting the position of the land given to them and marking it by flying one of our flags between two trees near the beach, Groene continued south for another week following the coast, then east, then northeast, stopping and trading with the Maya whom they now met for the first time. Finally running out of goods to trade, they returned to Tampico by sailing northwest, hoping to discover some of the islands that seemed to be so numerous in these waters. They were disappointed at not finding any by the time they got back, but were excited to report Qitzactl’s desire to ally himself with us, his gift of the land, and about contacting the Maya.

Parker sent word to Ocanizl about Qitzactl’s request, asking if he thought their two people could be allies. Ocanizl answered that it had been fifteen years since their two nations fought, back when the Totonac had tried unsuccessfully to take away some of the Huastec territory. He felt that, as long as Qitzactl vowed to direct any future attempts to expand his territory elsewhere, they could be allies.

The local natives met Groene’s return to Port Tlilxochitl with jubilation. Even though they had all heard the stories about the tame “man-beasts,” and some had even seen them, they watched nervously when the horses were unloaded from one of the three returning ships.

Groene’s ships left for Tampico two days later after a daylong celebration of their return to Port Tlilxochitl. Staying behind were a hundred archers and five hundred slaves from Tampico, many of whom had been taken from a Totonac city during Ocanizl’s retaliatory raid fifteen years ago. Parker felt they would make good ambassadors to the Totonac people, able to vouch for the way our people treated them. In addition, they would be able to help bridge any language gaps.

When the three ships returned to Port Tlilxochitl a month later with food, cacao beans to use for trade, and fifteen hundred more slaves, the engineer had a site selected, and a wooden palisade was under construction. They had completed a corral and planted fields both near the settlement and across the lagoon on the huge tract of flat, fertile land that had been given to them.

Some of the slaves went out every day in the four fishing boats they had brought from Tampico. Some of the archers hired a couple of hunters from the nearby village to guide them out into the jungle to supplement their diet with fresh game. Given a choice between cacao beans and meat, the village’s hunters chose game for their pay.

Qitzactl had arrived nearly a week after the first group returned, bringing food, and young female slaves as gifts for the men. Qitzactl watched, rapt, as the men rapidly tilled the soil using horses and plows. When he left, each of our men except for the male slaves had one of the girls as a companion.

My wives and I debated the request for the better part of a day before making a final decision. The question wasn’t whether I’d go, but which, if any, of them would go with me. Ihuicatl and Xochitl would go and help teach me their native language on the trip over, not that I’d had a lot of luck with any of the other languages my wives had tried to teach me.

Margaret, Abby, Claire, Anne, Isabella, Gisela, and Mei would accompany me. They were chosen simply because they weren’t pregnant, that we knew of, and didn’t have a newborn infant to care for. That left plenty of wives, concubines, and servants to look after governing, business, and the rest of the children. Always ready for an adventure, Zhou went with us to provide any necessary medical assistance. Two of his numerous assistants accompanied us, planning to stay there.

Each of the wives who accompanied me pulled out their own custom fit Wootz steel chain mail armor, Mongol bow, and Samurai sword. “We figured it’s only fair. We insist that you wear your armor when you’re anywhere that there could be fighting,” Margaret explained Abby made sure that I was ready for the night’s festivities.

We sailed from Agadir a month later. Ten brand new warehouses now augmented the dozen that had already been supplying West Africa and ten more were being built. Each warehouse had three floors. Each floor was full of rooms the exact size of the holds in the ships, so we had the cargo arranged well before the ships arrived. That allowed us to utilize the limited space as efficiently as possible. A wide walkway along the front of each floor of the warehouse allowed the cargo to be loaded from any floor of the warehouse directly into the hold of the ship.

New stone wharves stretched into the ocean just south of the city to make loading and unloading much easier. Items to be loaded were rolled out of the warehouse next to the ship, lifted with a capstan-powered winch or a block and tackle manned by several men, and then lowered into the hold. The newest wharves had six winches for loading each huge new junk-style ship. Barrels of water were transported in by mule cart or small sailing vessel from wells along the Sous River a few miles to the south. That helped to avoid depleting the wells in town. The Sous was one of the rivers Anuk had built dams on. Hundreds of thousands of acres along the last fifty miles of the river were under cultivation to provide food for the people of Agadir, food for the surrounding villages, and food for trade and for re-supplying our ships.

In addition, they grew and processed sugar cane, the sugar being refined and then transported back to Europe when our ships returned with their wealth from the West Coast of Africa. The original, albeit much-improved fishing port was still there just to the north for the fishing fleet to use. All the food used to re-supply our ships was produced in the Maghreb: dried fruits, dried fish, smoked and salted meat, citrus, nuts, and the flour that was made into hard tack.

The new warehouses were constantly refilled with food and salt, as well as iron goods, copper, swords, and crossbows from all over Europe and the Mediterranean. Those were for us to take to the new lands for trading, as well as for trading along the African coast. Merchants from other countries that we purchased products from still thought that we were taking all the goods to Africa and were happy to sell us more goods.

We did keep a wary eye on the quality of the goods from outside sources, knowing that there was always someone willing to try to sell inferior goods. By now, independent captains everywhere knew us well enough to keep accurate records of what goods they got from different merchants. We refused to trade with anyone trying to cheat us or anyone else and notified the homeport of anyone we caught. If we felt there were too many dishonest merchants in a given port, we threatened to have our ships embargo the port, including not allowing their goods or ships into our ports.

Speaking of honesty, in an effort to make sure each monarch that I paid taxes to was paid their fair due; I divided GRTC into six smaller holdings. GRTCR covers all taxes collected in my English holdings and pays the appropriate taxes to London. GRTCG does likewise for Grenada, paying tax to Sebastian for goods manufactured or sold in Castile. GRTCE covers my Egyptian lands, GRTCA my own lands in Africa, GRTCP covers everything from Persia, and GRTCU everything from Eastern Europe. All goods brought to Agadir were “sold” on paper to GRTCA at the usual price they would sell for in the rest of Europe or the Mediterranean. The exorbitant profit we made selling them along the west African coast or in Westland would all go to GRTCA where there were no taxes to pay.

Four more of the new, large ships for Westland had been completed in the shipyards of New Aragon. I had to laugh at the last Kings’ Council when some of them claimed that their merchants were complaining that our ships were hurting their shipping business. I reminded them that my ships carried almost exclusively my cargo, only taking on other cargo in the rare instances when they had room.

Often, we ended up shipping some of our cargo on their merchants’ ships when our ships were full, or we didn’t have a ship available. Besides, every major port had either recently begun or finished an expansion or was in the middle of one right now because their ports were now so busy, and I had financed most of the expansions for the same terms I got in London. Their merchants were just whining, wanting a bigger share of the cargo we carried for ourselves.

Carrying five hundred more archers and two thousand extra horses for Ames to use to train more cavalry from among the slaves, we set sail from Agadir with the rest of the holds full of weapons and trade goods. With nine women to entertain me, and I them, the five-week trip wasn’t terribly boring. Ihuicatl and Xochitl were confident that I wouldn’t embarrass myself or insult anyone if I stuck with the simple phrases they had finally managed to teach me.

We had a new navigation tool the mathematicians at the university had come up with in a collaborative effort. Parker had complained about the difficulty of fixing their position while at sea even when trading along the African coast, so I offered a sizeable reward to the staff at the university if they came up with a solution. We already equipped our ships with the best available instruments to find latitude; the new instrument would be to find longitude, or at least a close approximation.

Astronomers had long ago noted that they could predict the positions of celestial bodies. The moon was the hardest since the orbit was elliptical, not round. Still, mathematicians finally refined their equations so their predictions were accurate. Hundreds of mathematicians from both universities had crunched numbers and then verified their results. Finally, they published a set of daily tables for the position of the sun, moon, Mars, Venus, and nine stars, as well as tables of lunar distances. With the book of these tables, mariners could fix their longitude to within a quarter of a degree longitude, which was 17.25 miles.

To test their calculations, they had one of our ships sail east in the Mediterranean until they saw the correct lunar angle they had been assigned to measure. When they reached that point, they turned directly north and ended up almost exactly in the port at Malaga, as well as the next seven ports the ship was scheduled to visit.

Satisfied and very excited when it worked, they worked feverishly, employing even more mathematicians to calculate the positions and lunar angles to allow accuracy to a sixteenth of a degree longitude, or about four and a third miles. The tables covered the area from Batumi, the easternmost port on the Black Sea, to the Mali Islands.

After estimating that the new lands were between five thousand and seven thousand miles to the west, they began expanding the table. Using observations provided by Xun from his next trip, they calculated that the farthest reaches of Japan were almost exactly halfway around the globe from the Mali Islands. The data our current trip provided showed that there was still roughly a quarter of the globe left to explore between Japan and Westland. We again wondered if the ocean reported to be a five to six-week journey west of the Huastec capital might be the same ocean Xun sailed through when visiting China and Japan, or if there was yet another undiscovered land mass out there.

Captains visiting our trading posts in the southernmost part of Africa had reported that the tables didn’t work there; the stars in the sky south of the equator were different than the stars north of the equator. Astronomers were dispatched to study the problem. They spent more than a year studying the Southern heavens, re-working calculations for seven stars, the sun, moon, Mars, and Venus. Not surprisingly, the astronomers made sure they were assigned to Khoi to do their observations and took thorough advantage of the opportunity to search for diamonds on their sixth workday each week.

We took two astronomers with us to do precise calculations once we reached Tampico. They and the two scribes we took made several more copies of the tables that we had hastily assembled into books for our trip. I wanted each of our ships going to or already in Westland to have a copy of the tables to be able to pinpoint the location of islands more accurately, as well as, land sightings, our trading posts, tribes we traded with, and the individual villages we stopped at. It would help us assemble a more accurate map of this new land, as well as the fastest and safest routes there, and home.

Stopping first at Tampico, the archers and their horses continued on to Port Tlilxochitl with my request for Lt. Ames to let Qitzactl know I would be there to meet with him in two weeks. Unsure what Qitzactl wanted, I first wanted to get a feel for the new land and the Huastec people. I was surprised to find almost two hundred of the taller slaves training with the longbows I’d sent. While still not at the same level of expertise as our main force of archers, they were accurate to two hundred fifty yards already. In addition, a group of slaves were training as Iberian cavalry outside of town, and actually looked comfortable and competent on the horses.

Parker showed me his best maps of the area, pointing out where the captured Xi’ui cities were. Noting our interest in gold and silver, the Xi’ui had told us of several places where they occasionally mined those minerals. Parker had already sent the geologists, several miners, and some of the Xi’ui who knew the locations of the mines to check each location.

The lead workers we brought over found their workplace ready for them to pound the lead into thin sheets for the ships built here. The men we brought to run the smelters came with us to the mining district to train the natives how to smelt ore more efficiently into ingots or to better combine copper and zinc ore to make brass ingots to send to Port Tampico. They did the smelting at each mine to avoid transporting substantial amounts of raw ore. Gravel, slag, and crushed stone from the mining and smelting was being put to use building new roads or improving and expanding existing roads to make wagon travel easier. They used locally quarried stone to build homes for the workers and walls around the towns and mines or shipped it downriver from the hills to the port for building there.

After taking a day to check out Tampico, I left for the Huastec capital with an escort of a hundred archers. We were welcomed happily at every village and town through which we traveled. The leaders of each town thanked me for everything we did. The mines traded with them for food, paying them in ore or cacao beans, which they were able to trade for iron tools at Tampico. Many of their young men now worked in the mines, and women and older children worked in the mining village providing support for the miners while earning additional cacao beans for their own families. They even appreciated the improvements to the roads, as we frequently shortened routes by several miles when our engineers cut across the side of a mountain using their newest tool, black powder, to make the job easier.