Lawa River, Beginning of Wet Season
At last, the crew of the Walvis decided that it was time to return to their ship, head back to Europe and transform their Lawa River gold into the good things in life. They would have to stop at Gustavus first, to resupply, however.
They rowed back to Maria Falls, the current helping them along, and boarded the Walvis.
David inspected the ship and somewhat grudgingly pronounced himself satisfied with how it had been cared for in his absence.
“Up Anchor!” David ordered.
Surinamese Short Dry Season (February to April 1637)
The gas envelope was an elongated teardrop, with a side panel bearing the Danish coat of arms: three lions passant in pale Azure, crowned and armed. The gondola slung beneath it was painted red and yellow, the colors of the House of Oldenburg that ruled Denmark.
And a spy basket hung below the gondola. In it, from a height of a hundred feet, King Maurício waved to his people.
The idea for the spy basket had come from a 1930 Howard Hughes film, Hell’s Angels. A German zeppelin is shown flying over London, and it lowered an observer in a little streamlined observation car. This wasn’t a wild fancy on Hughes’ part, there were German spy baskets that could be lowered as much as several thousand feet below the zeppelin, on steel wire paid out with a winch. The support wire doubled as a telegraph line. The Sandterne’s spy basket was a more primitive affair.
Maurício heard a horn from above, and waved acknowledgment. It was time to descend. The “spy basket” he stood in was slowly winched down, and when the bottom swung a couple of feet above the ground, the ground crew grabbed and steadied it so Maurício could clamber out.
Once he was free, they signaled the airship, and the basket was raised back into the bowels of the Sandterne. The name painted on the Sandterne’s drop basket was, rather irreverently, The Yo-Yo.
As his wife, Kasiri, hugged him, Maurício told Carsten, “Now all of my people will tremble when they see me. King Maurício dared climb into the Heavens!”
“More daring than you realized, my dear King Maurício.”
“What do you mean?”
“Lars just told me that the Sandterne has not previously used the spy basket to carry a person. You are a true pioneer!”
It was fortunate that Kasiri had her arm around Maurício, as it wouldn’t have looked very kingly if he had fainted.
En route to the Central Amazon by Airship
“I can barely hear the engines, Captain.”
“I am not surprised, Mevrouw Vorst. We are just letting them idle, the northeast trade winds are carrying us in the direction we wish to go.”
“Then why run the engines at all? Doesn’t that use up fuel?”
“Oh, yes, but if there’s a sudden wind change, or other hazard, we don’t want to cold start the engines. If you want to ride out at a moment’s notice, it’s best that the horse already be saddled and bridled, yes?”
* * *
The airship was progressing southwest, at a height of about six hundred feet. They had already passed over the Coppename and skirted the northern tail of the Bakhuys Mountains. They passed south of Blanche Marie Falls, on the Nickerie, and then directly over Tiger Falls, on the Courantyne. This gave them a precise navigational fix, because its latitude and longitude were known from an up-time atlas. At their present height, they could easily see Frederik Willem IV Falls, perhaps thirty miles upriver.
“Right rudder!”
The rudderman pressed the right rudder pedal, beginning the turn to the right. Since the airship lacked wings, it didn’t roll into a turn.
“Engines one-half forward,” Captain Neilsen spoke into the speaking tube.
“One-half forward,” the engineer, in the engine compartment acknowledged.
The captain kept his eye on the compass. “Neutralize rudder.” The ship’s angular momentum kept it turning, but ever more slowly.
“Heading two seventy,” the captain said with satisfaction. The course change avoided the Kanuku mountains, farther south. While the Sandterne could easily climb high enough to cross them, Henrique and his party had come from the Rupununi, to the west.
They ran west along the fourth parallel north for six hours, then turned south. In still air, their cruising speed was twenty miles per hour, but they would have a bit of a westward boost from the diminished trade winds. It wasn’t too long before they spotted a key landmark, the Rio Branco.
They followed this guide to the mighty Rio Negro, the largest blackwater river in the world. Continuing downstream, they came at last to the confluence of the Rio Negro with the Solimoes, forming the Amazon. Here, on the north bank, in another universe, the 1669 Fort of São José da Barra do Rio Negro had become the nucleus about which the nineteenth-century town of Manaus had aggregated. And that town was the home of the rubber barons, who built an Opera House to prove that they were equals of the plutocrats of America and Europe.