Jack's business acumen and the Wench's popularity at the trading post being now well established, Big Alf spends a whole day going through the accounts ledger and finally agrees to let him barter Aggy's favours to one of the boatmen for a trip downriver. Perhaps he can spread word of the Wench's excellence to more hands from the ocean-going ships.

It works. Sailors, even officers (who have more to spend), visit the Wench in ever-increasing numbers. Everyone thrives, most of all Jack, who finally gets to see the ocean he's dreamed of all his life. He'd pictured a bigger, wilder, wetter swamp, criss-crossed by carousing sailors in larger versions of the riverboats. The real thing is infinitely more captivating: the smell of salt, gulls tumbling through the incomprehensible lacework of masts and ropes... and the horizon! It ought to fill him with dismay, for how can he find his way without a hill or a tree on the skyline to track the stars by? But all he wants is to swoop into that glorious, hazy distance and let it take him where it will.

On every trip to the port, Jack watches impatiently for the change from brown river water to turquoise ocean. Then he jumps right in. The boatman's alarm gives way to laughter once he works out that the daft lad from the whorehouse can swim round to the dock by himself. (And Jack squelches less once he works out that it's safe to leave his shoes and jacket on the boat.)

The clean taste of salt on his face as the waves bounce him up and down is the best thing Jack's ever known. When he dives down, several dozen green crabs pop out of the sand and nibble at his searching fingers. He assumes this is normal, so never mentions it when he clambers onto the hot boards of the dock, dripping salt water (and a couple of tiny crustaceans). Much later, this accidental silence will become deliberate.

But falling in love with the sea doesn't make Jack a sailor; talking himself onto one of those magical ships and sailing far, far away on her turns out to be harder than he thought. Ships dock here to load and unload, not to take on crew. Nobody wants a scrawny young stray ("I'm old for my size, sir, honest!") who doesn't know one end of a boat—ship!—from another. He considers stowing away, but not for long because he has a pretty clear idea what will happen once he's found.

So he charms as many sailors as he can and appropriates their nautical knowledge along with more tangible items. (He soon learns that officers know most about navigation and trade, but the hands know about the sea, the weather, and all the unseen pulses and humours belowdecks that decide if a ship functions smoothly or sickens and dies.)

He gets himself a compass (no need to dwell on the means of acquisition), and uses it to navigate logs around the swamp on lazy afternoons. But he knew his way around the swamp before; the compass just makes it feel smaller. Jack bares his teeth at the sky and rages. It's not fair: Mam said he was a sailor! He pauses, frowning, for Mam wasn't mad—not much anyway, and only at the end—and he knows he's no sailor, not yet.

What Mam said exactly, he now remembers, was that Da was a sailor and Jack would be too, one day. Because Da'd left a special sailor's thing for him; a thing that would make his fortune once he learned to use it, a thing he's been carefully not thinking about because all it does is remind him that he has no idea what to do with it... until now. He hurtles off his log and splashes home by the most direct route, not caring that he'll arrive covered in stinking ooze so long as he gets there fast. At Dorcas' shriek, he flings his muddy clothes onto the kitchen floor and runs upstairs naked (but still dripping a pungent black trail).

Da's talisman is there, with the clothes Jack (Tsaga'auweh then) wore in the village, in the leather pouch that hung around his neck. This was supposed to contain all kinds of mystically significant body bits and souvenirs of rituals, none of which Jack—born and bred in the godless, trackless world—had properly performed or possessed. Seeing how people sighed at Jack's empty pouch, Granny taken his talisman and popped it in there along with his fingernail clippings and a twist of frizzy black hair that she kissed lovingly as she took it from her own neck pouch.

"Something of yourself, your father, and your mother's father: that's big magic, Tsaga, you tell 'em. It'll protect you strong as anything the others have," she assured him solemnly as she hung it around his neck, adding, with one of those Granny sparkles that always vanished before he could be certain she'd winked at him, "Always provided you look out for yourself first, that is."

Da's beads look as pretty as ever, brighter than the trading post "jewels" (although Jack can now see the coin is worthless tin). He casts around for a safe place; somewhere it won't get lost or attract unwanted attention until he can figure out how to use it. In the end, he puts it back in the pouch and hangs it round his neck. (When he gets his shirt back, he'll hide the pouch under it.) Then he smoothes out the paper it was wrapped in.

Mam said it showed the place he had to take the talisman to claim his birthright, so Jack used to think it must be a picture though it didn't look much like anything—maybe a pattern of pools or blobby bushes that would appear on the horizon when he neared the place. But now he knows a thing or two about papers that show places and paths. As he thought, Da's scrawl is a chart! There's a sketchy compass rose in the bottom left corner and what must be a group of islands. There's writing as well, which he can't read, and daren't show to anyone else. And there's something very familiar about the paper...

Jack's chart is on a page from the kitchen ledger! René and Dorcas use this to keep track of monies spent and paid. Same paper, same symbols—or so Jack can but hope. If he can learn to read one, he can read the other. What with all the sharp trading he does in town and port, it's not hard to convince René and Big Alf that he could help with the accounts. They decide Dorcas can teach him his letters and, if he shows promise, René will tackle the sums.

But Dorcas leaves the ledger on the shelf and leads him outside, where she points up to the sign. "What's it say?" she asks.

Jack squints and scowls. He doesn't like feeling foolish. "The Wicked Wench, of course. But I can't read it. I just know."

"I din't ask you to read it," she states, "but, since you know what it says, you can at least try. How many words?"

He thinks about this. "Three?" It feels like three and the letters above the wench's head are in three groups.

"Right you are! First one's "the" so forget that for now, Jackie, an' look at the other two. Notice anything?"

He stares hard, quite forgetting to feel foolish. Both words start with the same letter, a kind of zigzag.

"Aye," chuckles Dorcas. "Now why might that be?"

Jack can feel his mind trying to make connections it hasn't got. How hard can it be if René and Big Alf can do it?

"I see the letters," he says. "I know what it says, but..."

"No buts!"

He shuts his eyes and mumbles under his breath, twisting his fingers together. Then he looks at the letters again and sees. "Because wicked and wench start with the same sound!"

Dorcas beams at him. "I allus said you was a smart'un, Jackie. Right from when you was born."

She lets him go through the ledger after that, proudly pointing out Ws: wine, walnuts, wax, wool, and—more perplexingly—tallow, pewter, and crowns. By the end of the year, he can read and write as well as anyone at the Wench, and do sums better and faster. Now he can read the paper his father left him: Shipwreck Cove, Shipwreck Island, 19°18'N, 166°38'E. Ask for the Keeper.

~

Jack can read the map now, but he still doesn't know what it means, or how he's supposed to get there. There are days when he lies on his back watching clouds sail across the sky and just wants to scream. He's put so much effort into enlarging his world, and all he's done is push the horizon out of sight.

Then the cartographer visits. Jack doesn't know he's a cartographer at first (and would probably have guessed it was something to do with carts anyway), but his curiosity is piqued by the skinny man in a shabby wig who buys brandy and tobacco, then sits reading a book for half the evening before he beckons Nancy over and slips her a coin.

It's an actual, leather-bound, printed book! Jack's itching to get his hands on it, an aim he soon achieves by hiding under Nancy's bed until he can pull the cartographer's coat across the floor and go through the pockets. He has to lean up to the very edge of the bed to catch the lamplight on the pages. He's on chapter two when a bony hand seizes him by the hair and forces his face up.

"A literate rogue!" exclaims a voice with the vowels of an especially stuck-up officer and the command manner of a boiled carrot. "You would appear to be a strange thief, young man."

"You're a strange sailor!" replies Jack, startled into honesty.

"Your statement," replies his captor, shifting his grip to Jack's wrist to facilitate conversation, "is based upon a false assumption."

Jack looks at Nancy, who shrugs.

"You observed that I came in on the Golden Venture and I am more than a passenger. You assume that persons on a ship must be either passengers or sailors, leading you to the mistaken conclusion that I am a sailor. I am, in fact, a cartographer."

Jack's not sure if he should look impressed or disparaging, though probably either would be better than admitting ignorance. He settles for an expression of polite curiosity, congratulating himself on his cunning when the visitor continues.

"That is to say, one who studies lands known and unknown and attempts to represent them on paper as faithfully as he may."

To cut a long story short (something Jack will do with increasing brutality), it transpires that the Golden Venture was dispatched from Plymouth by an English earl to seek new lands across the ocean. The earl dreams of cornering the market in some exotic product, an aim the cartographer views with some scorn. His dream is simply to discover and record the greatest possible area of the globe with the greatest possible accuracy.

Encouraged by Jack and Nancy, the cartographer—whose name is Philip Askew—is soon marvelling at his good fortune in having so swiftly made the acquaintance of the best-travelled person for miles around, namely Jack, who knows every secret backwater of the river, and even the savage lands of the interior where no white man has been.

~

Captain Redruth is less delighted with the information, but supposes grumpily that—provided he can get himself back to the ship before morning tide on Wednesday—Askew won't be any less useful for a day or two footling around in a swamp.

This deadline precludes a venture into the interior, but leaves time enough for Jack to guide his learned visitor along the upper meanders of the river. They set off in the Wench's rowboat (Jack having now definitively graduated from log canoes), loaded down with provisions, note books, sketch books, spyglasses, quills, ink, lead pencils, and a variety of other cartographical paraphernalia as fascinating to Jack as it is unfamiliar.

At first, Jack rows as instructed, holds instruments, boils water for tea, answers questions about currents and sandbanks, or the names of prominent features (invented for the occasion), and watches the cartographer sketch and scribble. When he's seen enough to form a notion of how this works, he begins to ask questions of his own.

Mr. Askew is surprisingly willing to provide answers, enlightening an enraptured Jack at some length on such topics as the methods for ascertaining the height and distance of hills, or alternative notations for indicating strength and direction of currents. Jack learns that a compass works because the Earth behaves like a giant lodestone, that the instrument resembling a collapsible, brass bow and arrow is, in fact, a Davis quadrant (less properly, a backstaff) developed by Captain John Davis, and used to measure the altitude of the sun or moon. He's even allowed to use it, standing with his back to the sun, sighting the horizon through a slit, and holding the quadrant so that one vane casts a shadow on the other. (Why anyone would want to do this is not explained, but Jack immediately senses its usefulness, having watched the sky since he first played at being a sailor in the swamp.)

By the time they are headed back to the whorehouse, Jack is noticing inaccuracies in Mr. Askew's new charts and realising, with an all-too-familiar sense of impending trouble, that he won't be able to keep them to himself. Mustering his reserves of patience and tact (such as they are), he frames a question about why a bend appears to divert ever-so-slightly further northwards on the ground than one might expect from Mr. Askew's drawing.

Astonishingly, Mr. Askew not only acknowledges the flaw with good cheer, but compliments Jack on his acuity (whatever that is). He thus becomes the first person in Jack's life to arouse ridicule, pity, admiration, and wonder in more-or-less equal proportion, and in sufficient measure to render him—briefly—speechless.

After this, the journey downstream is easy: Jack hardly needs to row, and Mr. Askew has only small adjustments and corrections to make to his maps. As they drift down the last, broad stretch of river, Jack attempts to sketch out some of the ground between them and the village, applying techniques learned on the way up. Mr. Askew is spellbound—less, as it turns out, by the creeks and woodlands themselves than by Jack's ability to depict them. He asks questions, sets problems, scratches his head, and—as Jack rows them home along sluggish channels through the swamp—makes an offer that takes the boy's breath away.

~

What Mr. Askew proposes is nothing less than a new life in a new world—the whole, entire, spherical world, as an awestruck Jack mutters to himself whenever his belief in the promise starts to falter (which it does quite a bit, especially after sundown). But a new life requires a new identity: more specifically, new parentage. Fortunately, Jack's father changed from Irish pirate to English sailor years ago, this being more acceptable for doing business with English traders; so Mr Askew is aware of only one problem.

"There's no denying her occupation, I'm afraid," he pronounces, as Nancy trims Jack's hair to shoulder length, and scrapes it back in a neat queue. "But I'd advise you to say she was of European stock—Spanish or Portuguese perhaps, to account for the black eyes and, er, dark complexion."

"Spanish it is," agrees Jack, sure Tsehu'alee won't care whether she's a dead Spaniard or a dead Savage. "Mi madre, Juliana."

Jack himself is perfectly happy to be European if such provenance confers privileges on a European ship. What rankles is the implication that he couldn't pass for pure English if he tried. He immediately resolves to work on his speech and mannerisms until he can confound Mr. Askew by passing himself off as a country priest or a village squire. (His notions of Englishness are somewhat hazy.)

Still, he's left with the uneasy awareness that all his cleverness might have been foiled by darker skin or the wrong kind of hair. Suddenly, he feels perversely proud of the village, quite forgetting how he was teased for his odd looks and couldn't wait to leave. (Years later, with his white status assured, he'll delight in flaunting a range of affectations "picked up from the Savages in the interior": long hair, beads, feathers, headbands, paint...)

"And you can't be simply Jack," says Mr. Askew. "What was your father's name?"

"I don't remember," replies Jack, who's never had a surname nor felt any need for one.

"You could be Jack Edwards?" suggests the cartographer. "It was my mother's maiden name."

"Why not?" says Jack. Then struck by a sudden, fierce loyalty to the name his mother chose: "No! I remember now: it was Bird. Or Small. Something like that. What's a small English bird?"

At noon, freshly scrubbed, dressed in his plainest shirt, britches and weskit (specially laundered by Dorcas herself), Jack signs on the Golden Venture under the glorious title of Cartographer's Apprentice. The name he enters in the log in perfect, painstaking copperplate is Jack Sparrow.

~

Tall Ship Tales

Prologue 1 (Tale Minus One): Shine
Prologue 2 (Tale Zero): Names


Tall Ship Tales 1: A Keel
Tall Ship Tales 2: A Hull
Tall Ship Tales 3: A Deck
Tall Ship Tales 4: Sails
Tall Ship Tales 5: A Ship