Seas of Fortune(154)

After about an hour of wandering, Iwakashu approached Tokubei. “Sir, you need to see this.”

Tokubei followed the mining engineer, who led him to a large patch of exposed rock.

“What am I looking at?”

“The cap of Daikoku,” said Iwakashu mysteriously. Daikoku was, Tokubei knew, a Buddhist God of Wealth. He was usually depicted as a fat, happy man with a sack of treasure slung over one shoulder, and holding a magic mallet aloft with his free hand.

“Please, explain what you mean. I don’t see any gold here . . .”

“Gold? No, not likely. Possible, but not likely. But this is a place strong in yin, where treasures are hidden beneath the surface.

“This rock is well weathered. Here is sekitekkou, the red earth of iron, and there is kattekkou, the brown earth of the same metal.” A modern geologist would call them hematite and limonite. “You see how different they are from the dull rock nearby?

“I call them the caps of Daikoku, because they often lie above a deposit of metal ore. Most often, outtekou or oudoukou.” Those were pyrite and chalcopyrite. “What miners call ‘fool’s gold.’”

“Okay, you’ve had your little joke,” said Tokubei. “Let’s go back now.”

“You don’t understand, do you?” said the miner.

“Understand what?”

“That we can make sulfur from them. The Chinese roast outtekou over charcoal; the breath of Huchi, the goddess of the volcano, emerges from it, and cools to make sulfur.”

Sulfur. Tokubei knew that to Lord Masamune, sulfur might be more valuable than gold. The shogunate restricted the supply of gunpowder to the colonists, perhaps fearing that they would one day try to force their way back into Japan. The Dutch would sell more, but they tried to “catch a sea bream with a shrimp”; charge a lot for a small amount.

Gunpowder had three ingredients; charcoal, saltpeter, and sulfur. Charcoal was easy, in Japan it was made by charring a hardwood, hannoki. There were surely American woods that would work well enough. Saltpeter could be collected in certain desert regions, or made from night soil.

But sulfur, Tokubei had thought, was only available as the yellow crystals found near certain hot springs. Hot springs the Japanese explorers had yet to find in America, although some of the mountains Tokubei had seen in his journey down the coast were surely volcanoes, and where there were volcanoes one might hope to find hot springs.

“Say nothing of this to anyone, and I will make it worth your while.”

* * *

Four men met that night in the captain’s cabin of the Ieyasu Maru, with a guard posted outside the door.

“So, this sulfur you speak of will enable the grand governor to make his own gunpowder,” said Hosoya Yoritaki. He was the commander of the Ieyasu Maru’s samurai marines. “I think that he will find that a most attractive prospect. It is best that we not be dependent on gunpowder from home. It is merely a matter of prudence; we don’t know when we might need it to fend off the Indians, the Spanish, or even the Dutch, and our supply line is very long and frail.”

“I am a big believer in prudence,” said Tokubei. “It is interesting, is it not, that this sulfur deposit is not shown in our maps from Grantville?”

“Most interesting,” Iwakashu agreed. “The up-timers do not know everything. Do you think that the grand governor will communicate this discovery to the shogun?”

There was a silence.

“I think . . . I think,” said Yoritaki, “that the grand governor will be of the opinion that the shogun’s interest is primarily in precious metals, as evidenced by Lord Matsudaira’s mission. There is no lack of sulfur in Nippon, the Land of Fire. There will, I daresay, be no need to speak of so inconsequential a matter.”

“And surely,” said Iwakashu, “if the presence of pyrites in California was information that the shogun should be aware of, the buddhas and kamis would have seen to it that they were shown on those very maps that he was given by the Dutch barbarians.”

A rather foxy expression passed briefly over his face. “So we are, perhaps, obligated by the mandate of Heaven to maintain secrecy, lest this information become known in Japan before the buddhas and kamis are ready to reveal it.”

“If we leave the miners here, the sailors will talk about it once we return to Monterey,” said Captain Haruno. “Even if they don’t realize that we are mining sulfur, or iron, they will think that we are mining gold. And that will attract undesirable attention to this place.”

Tokubei shrugged. “What of it? The colonists of Monterey are kirishitan, they are forbidden to return to Japan.”