WeTried Translations
Translator: ZERO_SUGAR
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ Wind and a Cluster of Stars
Chapter 13
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A Hard Decision, the Cold North Atlantic
24. A Hard Decision
I washed the clumps of mud off my boots with rainwater.
As I passed a puddle, I deliberately stomped to make it splash.
My whole body was exhausted.
I had been out in the rain the entire time, wearing heavy boots and a heavy, soaked cloak.
Still, when I got back to the ship, I saw sailors moving cargo.
Earlier, I had told Amy to sell whatever she could if the price was decent,
and it looked like she had managed to get a fair rate.
To keep bundles of paper from getting wet in the drizzle, the sailors wrapped them in yellow paper covers and carried them to a nearby trading post.
There was no point leaving goods in the rain for long, so the work moved quickly.
"How much?"
"Ah, Captain! 122% of purchase price."
"That's not bad..."
Maybe because industry was less developed, manufactured goods felt expensive.
"At this rate, regular trade between Ireland and London might be possible."
Amy showed me notes with prices for various products.
Most were farm goods and simple processed goods, and raw iron or peat (a type of coal, basically dirt-like coal) was very cheap and available in large amounts.
Peat in particular came from wetlands across Ireland and nearby areas,
and Dublin produced a lot of it.
With peat, you just dug up what was exposed in the ground...
"Then let's look at peat."
Amy and I checked the peat at the trading post.
Powdered peat was sold by sack, and it just looked like dirt.
A huge peat pile sat in an open lot, and workers in the mist filled sacks and stacked them in one corner.
I picked some peat up.
It held so much moisture that black stains appeared on my hand right away.
"There's too much water in this."
Which meant it was insanely heavy.
If the sailors carried this, their backs would break, and even if we loaded less, the ship would get heavy fast.
"This won't work. Peat is too heavy. And iron made from this kind of coal probably won't be good quality either..."
It came from wetlands, and it was raining too.
The next item on the note was preserved pork, bacon, and it looked very good.
Thin slices fried with eggs for breakfast would be excellent.
The eggs cooked in pork fat and gave off a great smell.
As if reading my mind, the trading post owner kept showing me bacon,
clearly hoping I would buy it.
But this was not mass-produced in a major factory. Each household made small batches by hand,
so quality was uneven.
Most importantly, the quantity was too small.
"Next is whiskey."
When I muttered that, the owner wiped bacon grease from their hands on an apron and brought in a crate of whiskey.
This was one of Ireland's specialties, and because Ireland produced so many agricultural goods, the quality was good.
Each crate held twelve clear bottles of amber whiskey.
"Do you have a lot in stock?"
"We have plenty of whiskey. A lot of beer has been coming in from other cities, so whiskey isn't selling..."
Exactly.
I could not rush in and buy blindly or just listen to other people.
I had to check goods myself, walk around, and find the right ones.
Agricultural prices were low, and whiskey made from those crops was cheap too.
Whiskey made from potatoes and barley was produced in large quantities in Ireland.
"When you think Ireland, you think whiskey, don't you? Ha ha."
Maybe the whiskey had been sitting too long, because the trading post owner even rubbed their hands and urged me to buy.
"It's 67% of the London selling price!"
Amy tapped her abacus, eyes bright, and liked what she saw.
I had to admit it looked tempting.
But...
"There's a problem. London definitely has whiskey production facilities. And whiskey has plenty of substitutes.
Besides, London and nearby cities probably never run short of supply."
The trading post owner's face stiffened.
It looked like nobody was buying.
"Unless it's even cheaper..."
"It's already near collapse pricing. I can't sell lower than this."
"We don't have a reason to buy this either."
"..."
"Amy, how much of this can we load?"
Amy measured the crate dimensions and calculated the volume.
Then she worked the abacus and divided by the fluyt's cargo area to get a rough number.
"About 340 crates."
"How much can we buy with our current funds?"
"Uh... um... one second... let's see, if we buy 340 crates, we'll spend about half our funds."
"What do you think? 340 crates isn't a small amount."
"I'm sorry. The price is already at the bottom, so this is the limit. Even if the King of England came, that would..."
I needed to buy something and head back to London, our final destination, but things kept going wrong.
In the end, was there only one option?
"Buy it. We should buy while it's cheap."
"Weren't you not going to buy it?"
"Let's head north. Better to circle back through northern Britain and return to London.
We'll go around on foot and sell it wherever we can. It'll be a little troublesome."
It seemed better to sell whiskey while moving through small cities.
Buying goods would be hard because quantities were small and product value was low,
but selling was still possible.
I told Amy to have the sailors load the whiskey.
...
April 18, 3:00 p.m.
After almost half a day at anchor, Red Tea cast off and left for northern Britain.
Amy seemed puzzled that I had bought whiskey, but I explained that prices were unlikely to fall much further,
and that small-town producers could never offer it this cheaply.
"But finding sales channels is the problem. There are no trading posts..."
"I know. We'll have to live with that."
The base hubs and major cities had corporate trading posts, but the places ahead had nothing like that.
Still, if we sold this, we could pay back the bank debt.
I returned to my cabin and wrung out the cloak that had weighed down my shoulders all day.
The wool cloak had soaked up so much water that it streamed into the bucket.
"I'm tired to death."
Soon Amy brought a late lunch.
"Thanks, Amy."
"It's nothing."
She served hotcakes and a clear soup with salted meat and cabbage.
The hotcakes were steaming.
I liked pouring lots of molasses over them.
But this time it wasn't molasses, and it wasn't sugar syrup either.
What sat on the hotcakes was honey,
and since I knew there was only one place honey could have come from on this ship, I could only smile.
25. The Cold North Atlantic
April 18, 6:00 p.m.
In about three hours, Red Tea cut through the rain and reached Belfast, north of Dublin.
From this point on, we could not rely on any trading post.
State-run trading posts existed to make profit,
buying and selling trade goods and running on the margin.
But most small cities did not have enough capacity or volume for that,
so now we had to deal with the lack of trading posts ourselves.
If a trading post existed, even when prices dipped, they usually bought goods immediately and stored them for future deals,
but here, even if we brought goods in, people could not buy them right away, and that was a problem.
Belfast felt similar to Dublin.
It was still a fairly big city in Ireland, but because access was worse than Dublin,
no trading post had been established.
So Amy and I had no choice but to walk through markets and shops in the rain as evening approached.
Luckily, there was some demand from merchants, and I managed to sell about fifty crates.
Even so, prices had already dropped as far as they could, so I made only 3% profit.
With other goods, even 2% can be good,
but for something cheap that had already fallen close to a crash, this was just pocket change.
And because Belfast had no trading post, conditions were poor for buying goods too.
While I had Amy move the goods into merchant houses,
I looked around at different products,
but there were only a dozen or so rolls of fabric and a little coal. How was I supposed to buy with that?
If I gathered all kinds of goods by type, storage would get messy and difficult,
and if I tried to gather enough quantity, I would have to collect from all over. Quality would vary, and time would vanish endlessly.
In the rain, I accepted a small amount of gold and silver coins.
Drops of water clung to the coins the merchant owner held out.
The coins were cold, and it felt like even the little warmth left in me was being stolen by them.
My wide-brimmed hat sagged from soaking up rain, and with no spare cloak, I had no choice but to put back on the wool cloak I had wrung out, so I must have looked absolutely pathetic.
Sad.
In the merchant owner's eyes, watching me stand in that rainy market, I read pity.
Still, what could I even do in this situation?
I was a poor trader, standing in the rain in shabby shape.
The ship waited for dawn and left at 4:00 a.m.
...
April 19, 7:40 a.m. Stornoway
We arrived at Stornoway, the biggest city on the Isle of Lewis.
I got off at the harbor, but only bleak silence drifted around.
The rain had finally stopped, but the smell of cold rain, old railroad ties, and fish guts...
those bitter smells mixed together and made the city feel even colder.
The city, once famous for fishing, was now painfully quiet after the fishermen left.
Amy and I walked through alleys and coastal shops in this faded city, searching for buyers.
At a small shop with peeling paint, we sold three crates.
I worried how the sailors and the other officers would look at me.
At moments like this, I wondered if I should have bought nothing at all instead of getting greedy...
...
1:00 p.m.
We arrived in the Scottish city of Thurso.
The seawater had grown colder and turned frighteningly black.
When I watched the waves breaking at the bow, I got dizzy without realizing it, and if I fell in,
it felt like I would sink forever into a bottomless depth and never come back.
We cast a sounding line to measure depth, but even a 500-meter line could not reach bottom.
Red Tea kept pushing toward Thurso through the morning.
We threw the knot line and held about 6 knots.
(Author's note: At this actual speed, it would take nine hours.)
Thurso was the northernmost city in Britain, always cold and blue...
and because it bordered rough seas, it had not developed much.
With harsh, empty wilderness behind it,
the city had formed close to the sea, where people could at least live.
Because of this rugged terrain called the Highlands, supplies were not plentiful.
Maybe that's why the whiskey we brought sold at a good price.
In cold regions, liquor that could warm the body was popular, so I went around taverns, restaurants, and shops,
writing buyers down one by one in my notebook and having the sailors deliver.
We sold at nearly London market prices, and even though Dublin and Thurso were not extremely far apart,
it seemed to be because logistics here were underdeveloped.
I had come through this cold sea with unstable weather myself.
Navigator Zenon kept deck work to a minimum and leaned alone on the rail, smoking.
Blue-white smoke scattered in all directions in the aimless wind.
Watching his dry, detached look made me feel even more tired.
I'd been in rain since yesterday, and the weather was only "not frozen," still cold.
But I knew Amy and Zenon were just as tired as I was.
Every time we bought or sold goods, Amy had to calculate profit and loss and inspect inventory.
Zenon had to wake up often through the night to check the ship and guard the course.
"Come down here. I'll have them warm up some drink at the tavern."
I told a nearby tavern to stoke a big fire.
Then I gave warmed wine to the mate and the navigator, and brandy to the sailors so they could thaw out.
...
Through the narrow window, the sky outside was still overcast and the clouds were dark.
But inside the tavern, the fire burned bright,
and for now, in place of the sun shining above the clouds, it scattered light everywhere.
The tavern was quiet.
It was not evening yet when crowds would gather, and the sailors only sipped their own portions in silence.
Only the tavern owner's knife trimming salted vegetables broke the stillness from time to time.
As if everyone had agreed, nobody spoke.
Was this the silence the weather brought?
Still, the yellow cat just wrestled with a tiny crust of bread and spent its own little happy time.
Among everyone on this ship, it was probably the one with the easiest mind.
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