The Golden Cross by Angela Elwell Hunt Read Free Book Online Page A

command of two ships and official permission to sail from Batavia in search of silver, gold, and a sea route to Chile. He was to serve as the expedition’s official cartographer, to sail with Tasman to map any lands they might discover. At long last the journey of a lifetime laywithin his reach, and though Schuyler had told his servants, he had no idea how he would break the news to his children.
    A light morning rain had swept away the suffocating haze that had blanketed the settlement for the last few days, and now the cobblestones of the street steamed in the rising heat. Van Dyck vainly smoothed his doublet. The linen fabric would be hopelessly wrinkled within the hour; it was the price a gentleman paid for living near the equator. Heat and humidity were part and parcel of life in Batavia.
    Frowning, he stepped onto the scrubbed stone path that led to the road. He had errands to run, letters to deliver, and an appointment with his lawyer. Everything must be in order before he departed Batavia, every eventuality prepared for. Sea travel was a great deal safer than it had been in years past, but the whims of the ocean still could not be predicted. Although Magellan had proved that the earth could be circumnavigated, the Portuguese explorer had left port with five ships and 250 men. His crew, 18 skeletal survivors, later returned in one ship—without their captain. Magellan had given his life in the quest.
    No, Mistress Ocean did not take kindly to men traversing her bosom, and Schuyler’s grown children, Henrick and Rozamond, would not hesitate to remind him of the danger.
    Van Dyck gripped his walking stick and kept his eyes on the uneven stones of the road. Just ahead of him, Broad Street was intersected by Market Street, the unofficial boundary between the “good” area of Batavia and the “bad.” The east side of Market Street was fronted by a ramshackle row of shops and taverns; behind those rooftops rose the tall masts of ships anchored in the harbor.
    The sight of those masts now quickened Schuyler’s steps. He wouldn’t have believed that the prospect of adventure could still thrill him, but with every year that passed he became more desperate to leave his mark on the world before he passed out of it. He was now sixty-two, well past his prime. This voyage might behis last chance to publish his work, to leave a piece of himself behind.
    Hessel Gerritz’s famous map of the Pacific, now twenty years old, had commemorated the voyage in which Willem Schouten and Jacob LeMaire discovered and named Cape Horn. But the center and southern edge of that map was a void, filled in with useless pictures of swelling seas and three-masted ships, disguising an abominable lack of knowledge. Schuyler longed to create a map that would reveal the unknown and illustrate the mysteries of
Mar Pacifico
.
    He could do it on this voyage with Tasman. Unlike Gerritz, who had drawn his map from Schouten’s and LeMaire’s journals and charts, Schuyler wanted to work on the actual journey, to create a sea chart that would be at once useful and breathtakingly beautiful, a combination of art and accuracy, truth and revelation. Like the European map-makers who painted gilded sultan’s tents upon the deserts of northern Africa, he would illustrate his map with realistic depictions of flora and fauna never before seen in Europe. His map would illustrate both beauty and science; the original might hang in the Amsterdam offices of the V.O.C. while copies would be distributed throughout the modern world …
    A sharp female screech interrupted his musings, and he looked up, pausing on the road with a firm grip on his walking stick. Lost in thought, he had scarcely noticed when he approached the wharf area, a run-down section inhabited by itinerant seamen and women of questionable morals. A group representing both sorts of individuals loitered outside a tavern at the corner of Market and Broad Streets. The scents of whiskey and Jamaican rum