WeTried Translations
Translator: ZERO_SUGAR
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ Wind and a Cluster of Stars
Chapter 23
──────
A New Plan, Unknown
42. A New Plan
May 9, 5:15 p.m.
"What a shame."
"Heh, I feel the same."
I sat by an unnamed bed of red flowers and let out a long sigh, and Amy agreed.
"Honestly, setting aside the trouble they caused, they were a big help."
"Exactly."
"People like that usually end up in the navy, or on a ship."
"Yeah. For a moment, after hearing all that, I even wondered if I should join the navy."
"Hah, come on."
Zenon listened quietly, then snorted.
To begin with, I had never even heard of a woman joining the navy, and I probably would not have met the requirements anyway.
(Admiral Richard Howe entered the navy at fourteen, so I would meet the age requirement, but there is still no record of a woman joining the navy.
Besides, this was the era when the belief that a woman aboard a ship [as a sailor] brought bad luck was strongest.)
Still, how amazing would it be to command well-trained soldiers?
"Either way, that is never happening for me now."
"Isn't there a way? Next time those Redcoats drink, we just keep pouring strong liquor into them.
Then they wake up late the next day and miss the ship again."
Zenon teased me like it was a joke, but regret was still regret.
People were sly creatures. They had never been under my command to begin with, yet I used them well, and now that they were gone, I felt oddly bitter and cheated.
"Well, whatever. We got here safely without major trouble. That is enough."
I dusted off my pants and stood up. Amy smiled, picked a red flower, and tucked it into my curly hair.
She wore one too, a red flower dotted with black specks,
and with her vivid blue eyes and blond hair, the red suited her perfectly.
My hair was thick and tightly curled, unlike Amy's straight hair.
"Oh, this reminds me. There was a woman in my neighborhood when I was young. She was not quite right in the head.
She picked flowers every day and braided them into her hair. I finally remember her name.
Her name was Great Amy..."
Zenon sang it out in a mocking tone again, and Amy threw the flower from her hair at him.
...
"Wow, hauling this all the way here was worth it!"
The line infantry charged in and tore through it like thirsty oxen, but most of the whiskey had survived the journey to this point.
Amy bargained with the Portuguese owner at the trading post, and this liquor, which I had bought at a normal market price, had climbed to 131% of cost here.
Liquor from Europe, and liquor from home...
I could imagine how much people living in this foreign city must have missed things like that.
"Wow, goods are generally cheap. They even handle unprocessed gold, and a little bit of diamond too!"
They traded tropical crops that grew under the equatorial sun, things like palms, quality lumber, and cotton.
Palms produced coconuts, famous for their delicious juice and white flesh, and coarse fiber made from the husk.
The rough, glossy brown mat we were standing on now also seemed to be made from that.
A coconut was a fruit, but the shell was very hard, so if you stored it well and kept it from sprouting,
it could be preserved for a long time.
"Oh! The trader says we can taste it."
It was common here,
but I had never tasted it, so I was still excited.
The dark-skinned Portuguese trader seemed to have time to spare and took one from a pile of coconuts,
shook it with a slosh, nicked it with a hand axe,
put a wooden cup to it, and shared the juice with us.
The juice was sweet, fresh, and full of flavor, and it felt energizing.
Then the trader split it in half and dug out the flesh with a pocketknife.
The flesh was unexpectedly thick, pure white like snow, with a faint milky, nutty taste.
Its cool, crisp texture felt unique too.
"It tastes good, but I do not think we can buy this right now. We have to go farther south."
I had not mentioned it, but we still had to sail several more days into southern waters.
Instead of buying from a small town market, it would be better to finish the job, then buy in bulk in this goods-rich city
before heading back up to Europe.
Cotton could be mass-produced with slave labor, and because of the hot climate,
fabric and raw material prices were low.
If we took that to Europe and sold it there, we would probably get a decent price.
I made a mental note to remember cotton.
The warehouses were packed with sacks stuffed tight with only the cotton fiber.
Even without processing, the cotton came out white as snow and soft from the start.
...
7:00 p.m.
Tavern.
After sunset, the temperature started dropping fast, and now it felt quite pleasant.
At the tavern table where we sat, small nocturnal lizards started to appear,
and one by one, moths drawn to the light flew in as well.
I decided to set our next plan with the mate and the navigator.
Now that we were no longer bound by strict timing, our planning became much more flexible.
"Well, look at that."
Zenon suddenly burst out laughing while reading the chart.
A bright-eyed little black lizard tilted its head from side to side.
To the lizard, the light reflecting through the green and brown bottles near the bug lamp seemed dizzying.
The little thing blinked slowly and almost looked sleepy.
It was clever enough to climb onto the table and eat the insects gathering around the bug lamp.*
When moths and other bugs hit the glass wall and fell into the water, the lizard quickly snatched them up.
*(Bug lamp: a lamp used to catch insects drawn to light. Here it means a lamp with a glass cover and a water tray underneath so insects fall in.)
"That thing is really smart."
Thanks to it, we had a brief pleasant moment.
Then the meerkat matter rose back to the surface.
This animal from the southern edge of West Africa had not been described in much detail by the society.
According to the rough map in their information paper, it was seen farther inland from the coastal forests, out in open ground,
and the note said it was not very hard to find.
"It will take about four or five days."
Zenon pointed at a mere dot on the chart, a landing point south of Benguela.
A landing point meant a place connected to an inland town, with a bit of docking infrastructure, or
a point where you could anchor for rough weather or repairs.
We found the landing point, but the parchment map the society gave us was little more than a rough sketch,
so I was not sure we could find it easily.
After finishing our discussion, around 8 p.m., we left the harbor of Saint George's in the cool breeze.
As expected, fresh water was expensive. Since they produced saltpeter there, gunpowder cost about two-thirds,
and because tropical trees grew fast, material prices were cheap too.
Red Tea soon set out on a sea route that would take three days.
During that time, I was already considering an additional objective, trading with the natives.
43. Unknown
May 10, 7:30 a.m.
Not long had passed since we finished a tasty breakfast of soft black bread fresh from the oven and soup made with roux.*
(*Roux means flour cooked in butter. It is a base ingredient for soup, but at this time storing butter on a ship was truly difficult, so it had to be resupplied at port and consumed right away.)
The sailors, still enjoying the cool sea breeze, slowly drank their rationed beer to finish the meal.
We found a native village marked as only a tiny dot on the chart.
It was about five hours past the small town of Baenaeng from Saint George's.
Small villages like this had little exchange with other cities or nations, and that
basically caused a lack of certain goods.
A long time ago, I had read a memoir from someone who made huge profit by trading with natives like these.
It was surely exaggerated to glorify their success, but Zenon said he had experienced cases like this before too.
That was why we had brought about four boxes from London filled with things those natives might like.
They were ordinary general-store goods, cheap colorful bead strings and universal daggers and the like.
...
An African shore with a gentle beach.
As the water grew shallower and clearer, small villages appeared along the coast.
An emerald sea...
African native peoples lived around this beautiful sea.
From long ago, they had gotten many supplies from the ocean, which was why they lived close to it.
Simple cylindrical houses stood with cone-shaped roofs made from light, straight branches woven together.
It was morning, so smoke rose softly from the center of each roof.
"Drop anchor, Colton."
-Krrrrr-clank- Splash
The heavy metal anchor dragged down on its chain and hit the sea, and we rigged the launch on the crane.
The launch carried me, Zenon, Amy, and two sailors, plus one crate of goods.
-Creak creak creak
Soon the launch was lowered to the water.
"How are you planning to talk to the natives? And they say there are lots of cannibals too."
"They do not look very hostile."
Amy hugged the cat tightly, sounding worried.
As we moved toward the sandbar,
I saw two very dark-skinned natives carrying several dried fish on a wooden pole for breakfast, watching us from afar.
I had the sailors row slowly so the people would not tense up or become wary.
It did not take long to reach the village about 50 meters from the ship, but natives started gathering little by little,
and soon a little over ten people were standing on the shore.
At least I could tell there were no weapons in their hands and no obvious hostility in their eyes.
"@#＄^#＄@#"
One of them shouted something at us, but I could not understand a word.
"What does that mean?"
"Not sure. I do not know either."
Of course, none of us could understand it.
All we had left was gestures.
-Thump
The launch touched the beach, and when I stepped onto land, the natives formed a circle around me.
Their skin was very dark,
even darker than the skin in the illustrations I had seen in books.
Their curly hair did not grow long and stayed close to their heads, and men and women alike only covered their lower bodies with light cloth.
The native women had bright red, orange, and yellow ribbons braided into their hair.
The men wore uncomfortable-looking nose rings.
When I first faced them, I felt deeply afraid and uneasy.
Their eye rims were yellow, their eyes were large, and they carried a fishy body odor.
I did not know whether they thought something similar when they looked at us.
"Uh... hello, everyone."
"Por-tu-gal."
When I greeted them, one native woman answered.
She wore a hair comb made of tortoiseshell, and it seemed she thought we were Portuguese.
Apparently Portuguese people had come through here before.
"No, we are English. English."
"Por-tu-gal."
She kept insisting anyway, even when I waved my hand and said no.
"We came to trade."
I opened the wooden crate the sailors brought, and the paper bags inside revealed
brightly colored beads, hairpins, and daggers in sheaths.
"#＄%＄#&@@"
They all started talking at once when they saw the goods, but again, I could not understand anything.
Still, a few of them pointed somewhere.
As they stepped aside in that direction, the village finally came into clear view.
Like a true seaside village, the first thing I saw was lots of fish hanging from poles.
Fish of all kinds, large tropical fish with their own colors,
were drying in the sea wind and sunlight.
Blue mackerel and red, big-eyed sea bream fluttered and turned in the breeze.
Behind them stood about twenty native houses with cylindrical mud walls, backed by a coconut grove.
I had the sailors carry the crate from the white sand to the place they pointed out.
The natives followed us.
I had worried they might suddenly rush us and attack,
but they did not seem awkward around us, almost like they already knew people like us to some degree.
...
The mud houses were arranged in a ring with a small open space in the middle.
Here and there, entire palm trunks had been cut and burned as firewood in stone fire pits, sending up smoke.
The native women took smoking charcoal from there and returned to their own homes.
Between the palm trees, hammocks made from palm fiber hung from trunks and swayed in the cool breeze.
We walked across white sand mixed with pink and yellow shells until we reached the house they pointed to.
In front of it stood a unique black native statue made of ebony.
That eerie black ebony statue wore a hat woven from leaves and held a wooden stick.
As expected, I had no idea what it meant.
"@#＄＄%"
I do not know if he had already heard we were coming, but an elderly man with deep wrinkles stepped out to the door.
His white hair was thick, and he wore only a few thin strands of beard.
"Hello."
When I greeted him, he gestured for us to come in and disappeared inside.
...
The inside of the house was surprisingly simple and clean.
Still, even in daylight it felt very dark because of the smoke and roof, so it took a while for my eyes to adjust.
In the middle of the sandy floor of that dark house, charcoal was burning, and there was a frying pan on a stone stove.
"They have a frying pan."
Amy whispered.
So they were not completely cut off from all other places.
As proof, this old man, who looked like the village chief, had an amber tobacco pipe used by sailors.
It was very old, but clearly an item commonly seen in Europe.
"Set the box down and wait outside."
The sailors put down the crate on the floor and waited outside.
The others and I sat on a long bench made from logs.
"!#＄＄%%＄^"
The old man said something, but I still could not understand.
The two young men standing beside him also could not understand what I said.
Amy tried Portuguese and Spanish, but they did not understand those either.
"We came to trade, elder."
Even as I spoke, I thought to myself that it would have made no difference if I had said something else entirely.
'Actually, I am a giant squid. I came to spray ink on your faces.'
Even if I said that, they still would not understand, right?
"@#＄^＄#!@#"
We still could not understand each other, yet the old man kept speaking to us.
Then he set the pipe he was holding on his knee and looked around for something.
Zenon quickly offered him loose tobacco from a silver tobacco case.
The two soon found common ground and began smoking with satisfied faces.
While smoking, the old man gave some instruction to the people beside him,
and the two young men went out, then came back carrying something in baskets.
One brought dried fish, and the other brought a big leaf wrapping chunks of some meat.
They put the fish over the charcoal and placed the leaf-wrapped cut meat on the frying pan blackened with soot.
-Ssszzzzzzz
The meat, similar to chicken, sizzled on the heated pan and popped with oil.
The smell was promising too, and it seemed like it would taste good.
"Looks like they want us to eat breakfast."
We had already eaten, but we could not know what they were thinking, and refusing felt wrong, so we had to eat.
I stepped up first and turned the meat pieces over so they cooked through.
By then the half-dried fish had browned nicely too.
"@!#%＄%^#"
The old man said one word, then picked up a piece of pan-fried meat.
Each of us also took one piece of fish or meat.
And a quiet meal began.
The cat ate grilled fish too,
and the old man watched in silence a few times, then showed no special interest.
"But what meat is this?"
When I questioned the chicken-like meat, the others were just as curious.
To be honest, I had worried they might serve us human flesh, or something equally unimaginable,
but this seemed to come from a smaller animal.
"What could it be... really..."
There were small bones in the meat.
It tasted like chicken, but they were definitely not chicken bones.
I had never eaten an animal with this kind of skeleton, so I could not tell at all.
Zenon looked like he did not know either.
"Come on, they would not feed us something inedible."
Zenon said that, apparently liking the meat, and ate several more pieces.
To be fair, it tasted pretty good.
It had a pleasantly chewy texture and a decent amount of juice.
As the meal went on and the atmosphere softened,
I knew I had to step in for real.
I picked up a bead necklace from the crate, offered it to the old man, then showed myself taking it back.
The old man seemed to understand roughly.
He pointed at the grilled fish, then pointed at a jar beside him.
Water sloshed inside the jar.
I shook my head.
We had not come because we needed food or water.
Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried