by Iver P. Cooper
An Alexander Inheritance Story
Queen of the Sea
In the Atlantic Ocean, en route to Trinidad
Early November, 321 BCE
“David Palacio, report to the staff captain.” The loudspeaker announcement didn’t say “immediately,” but that was understood. The staff captain was the second-highest ranking officer on a cruise ship, and he headed the deck department.
“Guess you’re in trouble,” said Eric, an able seaman. He continued munching on a sandwich.
“Big trouble,” added Giorgio, a plumber. “Or you’d be reporting to the chief carpenter. Or maybe the hotel services engineer, if the problem was in passenger accommodations.” He slurped from his drink.
David gulped down the rest of his meal. “I have no idea what I did wrong.” He didn’t question the assumption that he was in trouble.
He put his tray where it belonged and left the deck crew cafeteria.
* * *
As he made his way to the staff captain’s office, David wondered just what the issue might be. As one of the ship’s carpenters, one of his duties was cleaning the woodworking shop on particular days of the week. Had he failed a subsequent inspection? That seemed more like something that the chief carpenter would call him to task for. Not the staff captain.
Had the potable water filling equipment failed? That was a carpentry responsibility, a holdover from sailing ship days, when the carpenter was in charge of the water barrels. Or had a wooden handrail given way, injuring a passenger?
It was with these dark thoughts swirling in his mind that he arrived at the staff captain’s office.
* * *
When he opened the door, his qualms intensified. Staff Captain Anders Dahl was accompanied by Sherry whatever-her-surname-was, Sherry from Human Resources.
For an HR person to be present, perhaps as a witness, suggested that he had committed a disciplinary offense. Perhaps even a firing offense.
He took a deep breath, and said, “David Palacio, Carpenter, reporting, sir.”
Dahl invited David to sit down and pulled a piece of paper out of a file. “Your resume lists ‘caving’ as one of your hobbies.”
‘Aye aye, sir.”
“How long have you been caving?”
“Since I was thirteen, when my uncle took me to my first wild cave.”
“You’re from the Philippines?”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Lot of caves there?”
“Thousands. Including some of the biggest in the world. Some with underground rivers or lakes.”
“Have you been caving elsewhere?”
“Lots of places. I take a cruise ship job, my room and board and medical are covered, so I get to save up money, and I use my free airfare ‘home’ to go someplace with caves. I go caving until I’m low in money, and then it’s back on a cruise ship. It’s a sweet life.”
“What about in the Caribbean?”
“On Jamaica. I was hoping to go back at the end of this contract, but . . .” He shrugged.
“What do you know about black powder?”
“Just that it used to be used in firearms. And I think it’s still used for fireworks.”
“Well, you know that some of the Mediterranean powers have been casting covetous eyes at the Queen. We have had to use some of our up-time ammo to fend them off. That’s a limited resource, and we are going to need to make more before we run out. It’s easier to make black powder than the more modern propellants. The passengers and your fellow crewmen are counting on you to help make that happen.”
“What can I do to help, sir?”
“We need three components for black powder: saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur. Saltpeter is potassium nitrate. We’ve been able to buy saltpeter and sulfur in Alexandria and Tyre, but we can’t count on them to always be available. Soon every would-be emperor will be making their own gunpowder.
“We’ve been very cautiously making gunpowder on board, but once we’re in Trinidad, we want to move gunpowder production to the new colony. The gunpowder mill will want to obtain as many of the ingredients locally as possible. If not on Trinidad, then somewhere in the Caribbean.
“We’ve done some research in the archived Wikipedia, and it turns out that during the American Civil War, the Confederacy made saltpeter from bat guano. We have people with chemical backgrounds looking into just how to do that, but it doesn’t do any good until we find the bat guano.”
“And that’s where I come in,” David thought aloud.
“That’s right. By the way, we need guano that’s stayed dry. The reference material says water washes out the nitrates. Although I would guess that’s more of an issue for seabird guano than bat guano. I don’t suppose you know where there are bat caves on Trinidad?”
“Probably not,” said David. “I do have stuff on my laptop about caves on Jamaica. There’s even a Jamaica Caves Organization that I have gotten literature from. But even when a guidebook gives a location for a cave entrance, it can easily be a hundred yards off. Maybe more. And of course, the entrances that existed in the twenty-first century might not have opened up yet.”
“But you can find caves?”
“Well, typically you find out about them from hunters or farmers who live in the immediate area. So that’s who you need to ask first. If you want to find a solution cave, you want an area where you see limestone outcrops. You can follow streams and look for places where they disappear and resurface. Also, look for areas of heavy erosion. You can also watch for bats to see where they fly from at sunset or to at sunrise.”
“It sounds like you know your stuff,” said the staff captain approvingly. “What do you need to get on the project?”
“First, I need more cavers. The minimum team for wild caving is three, so two can carry out an injured caver. And if there aren’t any on board, I’ll have to train them.”
Dahl looked at Sherry and then back at David. “You were the only employee who listed caving on his resume. We have circulated a questionnaire to the passengers, but it will take time to get answers.”
“If there aren’t any other cavers, then check for people who have done rock climbing. Or who are physically active and have jobs that take them into tight, enclosed spaces. We definitely don’t want anyone who is claustrophobic, or who isn’t physically fit.”
“I’ll make a note of that,” said Sherry.
“There’s equipment I’ll need, too.”
“Make a list, and I’ll see what we can come up with,” said Dahl. “In the meantime . . . Dismissed!”
December, 321 BCE
On the Queen of the Sea, anchored off Trinidad
David looked over the would-be cavers that Sherry had sent to him. As he expected, the crew members were mostly in their twenties and thirties, and the passengers were mostly middle-aged. According to the dossiers that Sherry had provided, a few had rock climbing experience, and the rest had said that they liked to hike.
David had deliberately arranged for them to meet him in one of the larger interior rooms.
“Have any of you been wild caving before?”
There was silence.
“Have any of you been in show caves? By that I mean caves with stairs and electric lights.”
Several of the passengers had.
“Did they ever turn out the electric lights?”
They shook their heads.
“Move away from the walls.” David waited for his students to comply and then turned off the light. The room was now pitch-black.
“This is how much natural light you get in a cave once you’re far enough away from the entrance. Let’s just wait like this for a while.”
After a few minutes he said, “How are you feeling? Panicky? Peaceful?”
“Maybe a little of both,” someone answered. “It helps that I can hear everyone else breathing, to know that I am not alone. But wouldn’t we have a light with us?”
“Sure. But batteries die, and torches get blown out or run out of fuel. When that happens, you have to be able to find your backup light and turn it on.”
David flipped on the room lights. “Wild caving can be strenuous and dangerous. There will be times that you are crawling through tight spaces, making ascents or descents, or skirting pits. The point of doing exercises is to reduce the risk of injury and give you confidence in your abilities. The exercises you will be working on are to improve your balance, agility, stamina, flexibility, and upper body strength. Especially finger strength.
“We will do a few exercises together, so I have a sense of where you stand, but mostly you’ll be working with the exercise room coaches, who have all sorts of equipment. I have given them your names and told them what’s important for caving.
“Let’s look at your balance first. You may find yourself on a narrow ledge, or even a rock bridge.
“There are chairs along the side of the room. Each of you take one. I want you to balance on one leg, then let go of the top of the chair. The chair is there so you have something to grab if you are starting to fall but I am hoping you don’t need it. Try to hold position for thirty seconds. First on one leg, then on the other. And if you can hold position with the free foot raised underneath, try again but raise it forward. You can spread your arms out.”
After they did this for a while, he brought out a wooden box and had them do step ups and step downs, first forward and backward and then side to side. Then he had them do jump ups and jump downs.
“That’s enough for today. We’ll meet again in a week and in the meantime be sure to go to the exercise room to get your coaching.”
* * *
David made a deep dive into the ship’s Wikipedia archive, to see what it had about caves on Trinidad. There were some promising hits. The Tamana caves were on the northern slope of Mount Tamana, which was in the eastern part of the Central Range. Eleven bat species permanently roosted in the cave. The Lopinot Cave was in the Lopinot Valley of the Northern Range and was home both to nocturnal oilbirds and to a large bat roost. The Aripo Cave was also in the Northern Range, in Tunapuna-Piarco district, and also home to oilbirds as well as bats. The Dunston Cave was an igneous cave in the Northern Range, containing an oilbird colony. The Cumaca Cave was in the southeastern area of the Northern Range, and it had bats, but since it also had catfish it couldn’t be entirely dry. La Vache was in the Northern Range, on the north coast, and had oilbirds. There were several caves on the island Gaspar Grande, by the northwestern tip of Trinidad. There were also unnamed bat caves near the village of Paramin, in the western part of the Northern Range.
Hmm. The entry on the Northern Range mentioned, “Numerous sulfur springs occur on the riverbeds of Rio Seco Falls, demonstrating the volcanic nature of the region.” Didn’t the staff captain say that sulfur was an ingredient of gunpowder?
The Wikipedia search made it clear that it was unlikely that they would find any bat caves near Fort Plymouth, which was on the Gulf of Para on the west side of Trinidad.
Gaspar Grande was probably the best place to start searching, even though he didn’t have any specific report of bats there. Since it was a small island—0.50 square miles—the area to be searched was limited.
Finding the other sites would be a lot harder. No global positioning satellites in the sky any more. But the Queen had found its way to Alexandria and Trinidad without GPS, so perhaps its navigation officers would have some suggestions.
* * *
Normally, the navigation officers of the Queen were very busy individuals. But not so much when the Queen was in port. David was able to get an appointment with Elise Beaulieu, first officer for navigation, without much trouble. He sent a note to the staff captain and next thing he knew, he was on her schedule.
“So, I have Google Earth location information for caves, but don’t know how I can use it. I thought perhaps if I started at a known location—one the Queen had coordinates for—and kept my smartphone, that even without GPS it would tell me where I am.”
Elise shook her head. “Afraid not. Or, more precisely, it would tell you a location, but it would be wrong, and the error would increase the farther you traveled. The low cost accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometer-type compass built into a smartphone experience what we call ‘drift.’ I don’t know offhand how much drift you would experience in walking, say, ten miles, but I’d be nervous about it. You could, I suppose, carry out a test—walk between two points of known coordinates, and see how far off it is.”
“What about training me to use portable navigation instruments to determine my latitude and longitude?” asked David.
Elise sighed. “Assuming we had a sextant to spare—I’d have to ask the captain—it’s still a bit tricky. The simplest way to determine latitude by observation is to wait until night and measure the altitude of the north star. However, Polaris isn’t as close to the North Celestial Pole as it was in our time. So you have to correct for that. And for land navigation, measuring altitude is tricky because you don’t have the flat horizon that we do at sea.
“As for measuring longitude, the most practical method is chronometer-based. I guess that you would be using a watch or smartphone as your chronometer. You set the chronometer to Greenwich time (or some other reference time for a known longitude) and see what time it reads at local noon. Local noon is when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky. It’s not easy to tell exactly when that is, so we take two time readings, one a few minutes before local noon, when the sun is still ascending, and the other when it has descended back to the same altitude, and average the two.
“Here on the Queen, with sight reduction software corrected for the present day, we can do better, but I doubt that you could determine your longitude to better than a ten nautical mile accuracy. Your latitude error will be smaller, but still a mile or more.
“Given that Trinidad is about fifty miles from north to south and, up north where the staff captain said you’d be exploring, about sixty miles from west to east, I don’t think celestial navigation will help you much.”
She shrugged. “Sorry for the bad news.”
* * *
When David met with the apprentice cavers again, he told them, “While there are caves that are big enough to hold concerts in, most of the time wild caves are on the small side. And even if the individual cave chambers are large, the passages between them may be pretty tight.
“When you were first recruited, the doctors checked that you had healthy hearts and that your girth was less than forty-two inches. While that means you are physically capable of crawling through a reasonably tight passage, it doesn’t guarantee that you are free of claustrophobia. So, I have concocted a test. I’d like you all to try crawling through that.” He pointed to a length of empty rectangular ventilation duct that he had positioned inside the room. The opening was ten inches tall and twenty-four inches wide.
One of the students studied it, and said, “Hah, I feel like I am auditioning for a heist movie.”
Another joked, “Or I am on the starship Enterprise and I need to climb into a Jefferies tube.”
David tapped his foot impatiently. “Whatever helps you actually do it, as opposed to talking about it.”
They tried, one by one. “Fuck, this is uncomfortable,” one complained. “I haven’t crawled on my belly since I was a baby.”
“Imagine how much fun it is to crawl along a tight tunnel that is inclined, so you have to struggle against gravity going up or brake going down. Or when the bottom is covered by water. Or cave cockroaches.”
“You need to work on your pep talk,” one of the students muttered.
* * *
The next day, it was more crawl practice. This time, David had them enter on their backs rather than on their bellies. Or crawl halfway in, with the room lights out, and just wait there until David gave them the go-ahead.
“I once did a crawl that was six hundred feet long, and took me about eight minutes to complete. So you need to be prepared for the possibility that you’ll be in a tight space for a very long time.”
One of the students started hyperventilating during this exercise, and David let him out early. “Do you want to try again?”
“Not really,” he said.
“Well, thanks for trying.”
Now there were only five apprentice cavers.
* * *
David still had the problem of finding the caves without combing through a hundred square miles of rough terrain. Perhaps the natives knew where the caves were. Perhaps they used them for refuge or created art in them or stored treasures. Or perhaps they ate bats.
While the caves that David knew about were either in the Northern Range—Akpara territory—or in the Central Range—Kapoi country—David thought it best to speak to Lacula, who traded with both groups and also was the native most familiar with the ship people.
David’s first task was to make sure that Lacula knew what David meant by caves. He wanted a limestone cave, not a sea cave. David brought out his laptop and showed Lacula pictures of many different caves, pointing out the stalactites and stalagmites.
The next step was to convey the notion of bats. Wikipedia had a list of mammals of Trinidad and Tobago and there were a heck of a lot of links with photos in the section titled “order Chiroptera.” Scores of them, actually.
Reading the descriptions, he realized there were plenty of bats in Trinidad that roosted in trees or in rock crevices rather than caves. That was going to be a problem insofar as locating bat caves was concerned. The best he could do, he decided, was to show Lacula pictures of the bats that seemed to prefer caves. Ghost-faced bats, Geoffroy’s tailless bat, and Wagner’s mustached bat, for example.
* * *
At Lacula’s trading post, David said, “I want to find caves with bats in them. Dry caves, not sea caves. Are there any in the land of the Kaluga?”
Lacula shook his head. It was what David expected. While a lowland could still have sinkholes—Florida was notorious for them—Wikipedia had not mentioned any caves in southern Trinidad.
“What about in the lands of the Akpoka and the Kapoi?”
“There are certainly bats there,” he said. “As for bat caves, I can find out.” He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together and smiled.
“Yes, there will be a reward for you—if your informants lead us to a bat cave.”
* * *
The next day, any thoughts of bats were overshadowed by the news that one of the passengers, while trying to clear away growth for a farm, had been bitten just after sunset by a four-foot long pit viper.
A couple of Kaluga managed to kill the snake, and it was subsequently identified from Wikipedia photographs as a fer-de-lance, so called because its head was shaped like an iron lance or spearhead. More precisely, it was Bothrops atrox, called mapepire balsain on twenty-first century Trinidad.
The bitten passenger, who was about seventy years old, had to have his leg amputated just below the knee.
The fer-de-lance was a major topic of conversation at the next caving skills practice.
“Wikipedia says that Bothrops vipers are responsible for more fatalities in the Americas than any other group of venomous snakes,” said one caving apprentice.
“That poor guy was bitten around sunset,” offered another. “Isn’t that when we would be looking for bats flying out of the caves?”
David had been researching the fer-de-lance, too. He found in the ship’s electronic library a copy of Douglas Preston’s The Lost City of the Monkey God. It said that the fer-de-lance comes out mostly at night, is attracted to people and activity, and is irritable and aggressive. It can spray venom six feet away, and its fangs can penetrate even the thickest leather boot.
“I’m not from here,” said David, “but in the Philippines, there are plenty of venomous snakes. We have sea snakes, coral snakes, pit vipers, spitting cobras, and even the king cobra. I’ll make sure that we have snake gaiters. They give additional protection from the instep to just below the knee.” David refrained from quoting Preston’s comment that the fer-de-lance sometimes leaps upward when it strikes, hitting above the knee.
“We will also have lanterns so we can see what’s on the trail ahead of us. You can carry a walking stick to probe the ground ahead of you. And we will sleep in hammocks.” He paused. “And if you need to go pee, look below you first.”
January, 320 BCE
Fort Plymouth
“You must be David Palacio, the caver.”
David turned. He was being addressed by one of the passengers. Very attractive, and well dressed to boot. That wasn’t common on Fort Plymouth, given the heat and humidity. It suggested that she worked someplace with air conditioning.
“How could you tell?” David smiled. He was wearing a hard hat with an LED light attached and carrying a coil of rope. He was just returning from a practice session with his student cavers.
She gave him a fifty-kilowatt smile, which made him a bit suspicious. “I’m Amanda Miller, assistant to President Wiley.”
“I have heard of you.”
Before the Event, since he was a carpenter, a lot of his work was in the passenger cabins and hallways. His conversations with them had been on the order of “Good morning” and “Excuse me.” Fraternization with passengers had been discouraged. Since the Event that had changed somewhat, but there were four thousand passengers, and he certainly didn’t know all of them. Amanda, however, had played a prominent role in Wiley’s campaign to be President of New America, as Trinidad was now called. Even the parts that the natives hadn’t actually ceded to the ship people.
“Could we talk in private, please?”
David shrugged and pointed. “We can go under that tree.”
“Great.” Once they were situated, Amanda went into her spiel.
“The gunpowder mill is owned fifty-fifty by the Queen of the Sea Corporation and the government of New America.”
“Okay . . .”
“But the mill gets its saltpeter from the Queen of the Sea Corporation, and they charge a lot for it. They say it is because they have to import it from the Mediterranean, and the countries that have it keep raising their prices, as they are making their own gunpowder. They say the only reason they can still get it is because the Egyptians figure that if they don’t sell to the Queen, the Carthaginians will, and so on.
“Now, one way of making saltpeter is by processing human waste. That’s how it was done in England, say. But we don’t have the population base to have a lot of that. And it takes time for the niter beds to mature.” She involuntarily wrinkled her nose.
“Since some of your apprentice cavers are passengers, I know that the Queen is planning to have you find bat caves on Trinidad, to give it a domestic supply of saltpeter. But they haven’t said a word about sharing the benefit of that supply with New America.”
David squirmed. “I’m a full-time employee of the Queen.”
“Yes, and you are being paid a carpenter’s salary to do something that no one else on this island can do. We—meaning the government of New America—have a much greater appreciation of your value. If you were to do cave exploration for us instead, we’d be willing to show our appreciation in a very tangible way. You wouldn’t just get a salary, you’d be given royalties on the production from the caves you discovered.”
“I’ll . . . I’ll have to think about it.”
“Do that. To give us clear title to your discoveries, you’ll need to resign from the Queen and be under contract to us before you find any bat caves. And as a practical matter, that means you need to make a decision before the Queen heads back to the Mediterranean. Which I believe will be happening next month.”
* * *
The Queen was down-sizing, David knew. Before the Event, it had a crew of almost a thousand. Scuttlebutt had it that Human Resources was trying to cut that number in half. Moreover, David heard that they were trying to get rid of almost all of the original hotel staff, since they could get cooks, waiters, and so on more cheaply in Europe.
Strictly speaking, David was in the deck department, not in hotel services. But there wasn’t a tremendous demand for carpenters on board a modern cruise ship. The cabins had wooden paneling, wooden handrails lined the internal corridors, and the promenade deck was wood, but the hull was metal.
It was true that a ship’s carpenter worked in more than just wood; they also handled glass and aluminum. But there were glassworkers as well as carpenters for hire in Europe, and it would be awhile before anyone was producing aluminum.
David figured that the only reason he hadn’t been involuntarily discharged to the colony was because of his caving skills. But what would happen to him once he found a bat cave with guano?
The deal from New America was sounding better and better.
* * *
The 150,000-ton Queen of the Sea was one of the largest cruise ships in the twenty-first century world it came from, and it therefore offered some unusual “at-sea” recreational activities. One of those was a climbing wall. The first cruise ship with a climbing wall was Royal Caribbean’s 1999 Voyager of the Seas, 137,000 tons. And a decade later, the 156,000-ton Norwegian Epic upped the ante with a rappelling wall.
Before the Event, David had not been able to try it out, as it had been reserved for guests. Once he was given the task of training a caving team, he quickly realized that it should be incorporated into the program. Southwest Trinidad, where Fort Plymouth was situated, was rather flat and thus offered little opportunity to learn climbing skills.
David called his students to attention. “I know that there are a couple of experienced rock climbers among you, and I hope you will help the others.
“This is a good, safe place to begin learning climbing skills, but bear in mind that here you don’t have to worry that the rock you are holding onto will give way. Or that a climber above you might dislodge a rock. And the Queen‘s wall isn’t slippery, either, as walls in caves often are.
“Given the climate here on Trinidad, we are going to be sweating a lot, which makes it harder to maintain a good hold on even a dry cliff face. Unfortunately, I don’t think we have a lot of climbing chalk available. Back in the Philippines, we used dry dirt or sand, or crushed dry leaves.”
The Queen had an employee who served as the rock climbing wall instructor and guard, and David let him explain how to use the climbing harnesses and ropes (some of which would be commandeered by David, as authorized by the staff captain). The team tried out several routes, which varied in difficulty.
Once they were all back at the base of the wall, David congratulated them on their progress.
One of the students raised his hand. “I am not sure why we need climbing skills. The whole point is to mine bat guano, right? We aren’t going to have miners go up and down ropes every day.”
“Good question,” said David. “If we find bat guano, an evaluation will be made of how difficult it is to access, and whether we can make that access easier. We can install ladders or build stairs or hoists. Whether it is worth it or not depends on the depth and how much guano is there. But the first step is to find the guano, and for that, we need to be able to climb if need be.”
* * *
David brooded about an essential set of skills that he had not been able to teach: the ones used for climbing in confined spaces. While they might descend a rope to enter a cave system, once they were inside, chimneying, stemming. and bridging would probably prove more useful. All three techniques involved bracing oneself between two walls and using pressure to move vertically or horizontally.
Some athletic centers that David had visited had climbing walls with special spelunking sections, where two walls nearly met. You could practice chimneying there, but the Queen‘s climbing wall was of a simpler type.
Some of the passageways on the Queen were three feet wide and seven feet high. That was theoretically suitable for practicing horizontal movement in a chimney. But the flat walls made it tricky, as there were no footholds or handholds.
It looked like David’s students would have to just follow his lead when they encountered a chimney in a cave.
* * *
David and his team pushed a Zodiac into the water of the Gulf of Paria, near modern San Fernando, and clambered aboard. The helmsman started up the outboard motor and they chugged off. The Zodiac could easily go sixty miles per hour but he kept it throttled down to conserve fuel. Even at reduced speed, they made it to Gaspar Grande in an hour.
The Queen did not have a complete Google Earth download but it did have full detail for the Caribbean, which was its expected theater of operation. This download included a georeferenced photo of “Gasparee Caves,” on Gaspar Grande. The picture showed a large cave room with stalactites and stalagmites.
Gaspar Grande was nominally within Akpara territory, but the Akpara who came to Fort Plymouth doubted that it was inhabited, as it had no fresh water sources. As far as they knew, at least.
Google Earth showed that the island was about 1.5 miles long, west to east, and about half a mile wide, north to south. The dominant physical feature was a west-to-east ridge with three humps. If the georeference was accurate, the cave was on the westernmost hump, a little north of the ridge line.
The easiest access appeared to be from a little cove on the northwest side of the island. From there, if they walked in the correct direction, it should be a tenth of a mile. Unfortunately, the island was heavily forested. Finding the cave wasn’t going to be easy.
They decided to head straight south from the cove and hope for the best. Progress was slow; they had to keep cutting undergrowth with their machetes. It eventually became apparent that they had crossed the ridge line and were descending toward the south side of the island. They had obviously overshot the cave. Assuming the georeferenced location was correct. And their compass was properly corrected for magnetic variation and deviation. And they had picked the correct course. And there was in fact an entrance to the cave in this century.
They decided to return to the ridge line and wait there until sunset. Hopefully, they would see bats, and they could judge the cave’s location from the bats’ flightpath.
* * *
They didn’t see any bats. However, there was no lack of mosquitoes, which did their darndest to bite through the netting covering their faces and necks.
They made camp for the night.
* * *
At sunrise, they did see bats . . . and they were flying in the opposite direction from the one expected. That is to say, south, over the ridge, instead of north.
That was annoying, to say the least. It took another couple of days of camping to actually find the cave. The bats flew out at sunset and returned at sunrise.
The cave was a large one. It wasn’t completely dark because there was a series of surface sink holes above. (The team had roped down through one of them.) At the bottom of the cave was a saltwater lagoon. There were fish-eating bats, but obviously, their guano was feeding the fish, so the cave couldn’t be mined.
“Very pretty,” said David, “and perhaps in fifty years, we’ll have stairs, electric lights, and tourists to overcharge. But insofar as the gunpowder mill is concerned, this is a dud.”
* * *
David still had to make a decision about the New America offer. He definitely didn’t want to antagonize the staff captain on the Queen by getting in the middle of the sometimes fraught relations between the Queen and New America.
While New America’s offer to David sounded good, David wondered what would happen once he found the guano. Would they want him to keep looking for additional caves, or would it be, “Thanks, go find someone who needs a carpenter.”
David decided he needed to up his game and figure out what value caves might have once modern gunpowder replaced black powder. He did some research and it appeared that the most obvious point was that bat guano could be used as a fertilizer. Moreover, it appeared that saltpeter, besides being used to make gunpowder, could also be used as a bluing agent, a preservative, a thickening agent, and an anti-asthma and hypotensive medication.
He kept digging and found out that cave silt contains actinomycetes and molds that might secrete antibiotics, and dried “moonmilk,” a claylike cave material used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a wound dressing. As for cave minerals, gypsum was used to make white body paint, and mirabilite and epsomite for food seasoning. Finally, caves had been used for mushroom growing and cheese aging, and cave air could air condition buildings. David wasn’t sure that the latter uses would be practical in Trinidadian caves, since cave temperatures increased as latitude decreased.
Hopefully, that was enough to make sure that New America would be willing to keep a caver on their payroll, long-term.
With this literary ammunition in hand, he sought out Amanda Miller and got a contract from New America, on better terms than those offered initially, to start upon his resignation from the Queen.
* * *
By this point, the Queen had a formal schedule of payouts for resigning crew members, based on their department, rank, and seniority with the cruise line. Even so, they tried to talk him out of resigning, realizing that if he succeeded in his quest, New America would have an independent source for saltpeter. But they weren’t willing to match New America’s offer.
Of course, that put the onus of equipping the caving expedition on New America.
“So what’s needed?” asked Amanda warily.
“For orienteering, we will need compasses, machetes, at least one pair of binoculars, and some sort of waterproof writing gear. Clothing to protect us from insects, snakes, thorns, and rock scrapes. Stuff for marking a trail that won’t quickly wear or blow away.
“For the actual caving, hard helmets, helmet-mounted lights, backup lights, knee and elbow pads, first aid kit, knives, whistles, and ropes. Climbing harnesses and associated gear, like tensioners, too. With fewer passengers on board, there are going to be fewer people making use of the Queen‘s climbing wall.
“Bear in mind that I already asked the staff captain to get all that equipment when I was working for the Queen. Hopefully, he will loan or sell it to New America.”
“Leave that to me,” said Amanda.
March, 320 BCE
Lacula had put out feelers as to whether any of the natives had come across bat caves. But that didn’t mean that he hired messengers to go to every Akpara and Kapoi village. That would have been expensive, and he hadn’t been offered any up-front payment. No, as Akpara and Kapoi came to his trading post, he brought up the subject and asked them to spread the word. So news of the ship people’s interest in bat caves disseminated slowly, along the coast and up the rivers.
According to Wikipedia, the biggest concentration of known caves was in the Northern Range. David thought the easiest of those caves to find would probably be Lopinot Cave. He had compared the Google Earth imagery to a Wikipedia map of Trinidad that showed watercourses. That showed that the Caroni River could be followed upstream, eastward. According to the Google Earth imagery, counting from the mouth, the fifth tributary coming down from the north was the one David wanted. It was called the Oropuna, and before it came the San Juan, the Saint Joseph, the Tunapuna, and the Macoya.
Heading upstream on the Oropuna, he would take the “second stream left,” the Arouca, and continue northward, passing close to the up-time village of Lopinot. (At some point, presumably, it became the Lopinot River.) According to Wikipedia, a plantation was established there in the early nineteenth century because it was flat land in the midst of mountainous terrain. Perhaps the Akpara had settled it for the same reason?
Google Earth showed a georeferenced photo of an entrance to “Lopinot Cave” a short distance upstream of the village, and being able to follow a river would be a big advantage in terms of finding the place.
Of course, the Google Earth photography showed the northern Trinidad of the early twenty-first century, not the fourth century BCE. River courses could change considerably over twenty-three hundred years. Moreover, even if the imagery was accurate in the here-and-now, this was the dry season, and they might overlook one of the tributaries if it was dried out.
Also, unfortunately, the land flanking the Caroni River was flat, and, looking at a simulated view of the Northern Range from the confluence with the fifth tributary, there was no obvious landmark they could use as a reference.
David had created a waterways sketch map based on the Google Earth data, and explained it to Lacula. Hopefully, he would explain it in turn to his Akpara contacts, and they would know what turn-offs David’s expedition needed to make.
* * *
Lacula found an Akpara in Fort Plymouth who was the brother of one who had married into an Akpara village somewhere up the Caroni. Lacula believed that this village was in the vicinity of the mouth of the fourth tributary, the Macoya, and thus not far from the desired turn off.
The Akpara visitor was confident he could lead David’s party to his brother’s new village. He didn’t know anything about bat caves, there or elsewhere, but Lacula nonetheless pressed David for a “finder’s fee.” David referred him to Amanda, who paid him off. Of course, the Akpara would also be hired as a guide.
* * *
It still bothered David that he was so reliant on native knowledge, and the accuracy of Lacula’s communications with the Akpara, to find the correct tributary. He knew the distance from the mouth of the Caroni to that tributary in Google Earth. Could he use that?
Elise had warned him that dead reckoning by use of his smartphone would be inaccurate because of drift—integration errors. And unless he had a solar charger, the smartphone would run out of juice before he reached his destination. An ordinary pedometer wouldn’t work if he was on a boat. He did some investigating, and found out that in the mid-nineteenth century, there was something called the “patent log,” a vaned rotor towed behind the ship.
That was something that, as a carpenter, he thought he could build. And he could correct to some degree for the effect of river current by measuring how many turns it made in a set period when he held it at a fixed point in the river, using a long fishing pole, perhaps. And if he didn’t have a working watch or smartphone, he could use a sand timer.
* * *
New America had acquired several of the Queen‘s all-weather lifeboats, since the Queen was going to carry fewer passengers from now on. The boats were equipped with engines, folding mast and sail, and oars.
Two were assigned to David’s expedition, the Miss Anne and the Miss Betty. One carried David, his caving team, and their equipment, and the other their native support group—interpreters, porters, a cook, and guards. Prudently, both boats carried food and drinking water.
They sailed from Fort Plymouth to the Akpara village at the mouth of the Caroni River. As Lacula had warned them, they had to work their way through a mangrove swamp and then over a sandbar.
The village buildings were round huts, not unlike Lacula’s trading post, arranged in a circle. Since it was the dry season, there didn’t appear to be much activity in the nearby fields. Dogs barked at the expedition members as their native guide led them into the village. The Akpara guide found his brother’s hut and brought him out to meet the visitors. David presented gifts to him.
The brother then took him to meet the First Man of the village. This warranted a further presentation of gifts. The First Man urged David to switch to dugout canoes. It was now the middle of the dry season, and the lifeboats weren’t likely to make it far upriver. The skippers of the Miss Anne and Miss Betty said that they would return to Fort Plymouth but would revisit the mouth of the Caroni in May, or earlier if they received a message that they should do so.
While some of the Akpara canoes had sails, those weren’t going to help them. Trinidad was in the northeast trade wind belt, and that meant that the wind would be against them.
As the expedition poled its canoes up the Caroni, David couldn’t help but notice how high the banks were above the present water level. It was a sign of what they could expect come June, when the rainy season began.
When they made camp the first night on the Caroni, David watched the scarlet ibises, hundreds strong, returning from Venezuela to their roosts in the mangrove swamp to the south.
It was one of the most remarkable sights David had seen in all the time he had spent in the wilds of the world.
Lopinot Region, Trinidad
David’s party was passed on, from one village to another, until they found one where the residents had knowledge of bat caves. David didn’t know for sure whether the village they had been guided to was in the vicinity of modern Lopinot, but he thought it likely. The distance traveled, based on his patent log, seemed about right, and this was a flat space in a mountainous region.
The cave that the Lopinoteans led David to was a sloped hill. The entrance was of a moderate size. David and his cavers entered it single file. Pillars of limestone flanked the entrance, and they were green with algae. They worked their way around some large blocks and found themselves in a chamber about twenty feet long. There were several knee-high stalagmites.
“Do you smell something?” asked one of the cavers. “Like ammonia cleaner?”
“You’re smelling bat urine,” said David. “That’s a good sign.”
They studied the walls and roof, but didn’t see anything. “I can’t hear them either,” one added.
David had told them that the sounds that bats make to navigate and find prey—the echolocation sounds—were pitched too high for humans to hear. (He had hoped that one of the electrical engineers on the Queen could build him a bat detector, but they had been way too busy.) What you could hear unaided were the social communication sounds: pups asking to be fed, male bats seeking a mate, or fighting bats insulting each other.
They moved deeper into the cave, and, in the center of the chamber, they found bats. They were roosting in a ceiling pit. David pointed them out to his cavers.
“What kind of bat are they?” someone whispered.
“I am not sure,” said David. “We’d have to catch one, and then I’d have to look it up in my guide. Bats are usually identified by their echolocation calls, but for that I’d need an acoustic bat detector, and I don’t have one.”
“How many do you think are up there?”
David shrugged. “A few hundred.” He brought his lantern close to the floor and studied it. “But what’s important is we’re walking on compacted guano.”
The cavers took out tools and bagged samples of the guano from different parts of the cave and different depths below the surface.
“Are we all set?” asked David. “Okay, let’s continue.”
At the back of the chamber another, rather narrow passageway sloped downward. David crawled in, belly down.
The passageway was perhaps five feet long and led down into a larger cave. While the upper cave had a relatively flat floor, this one was more of an inverted cone. Here the slope deepened to about forty-five degrees. David called for a weighted rope to be brought down to him. Once he had the rope in hand, his assistant backed up the passageway with the aid of the rope (and, when he got far enough up-slope, yet another caver pulled the assistant up by his feet).
Here, he used his LED headlamp. (He had made only sparing use of this, because there were only so many batteries in Fort Plymouth.) It appeared that there was guano here, too, but looser. He took a couple of samples, and then headed back up.
“We’re done for the day, let’s head back to the village.”
“And do we start heading back to our rendezvous point tomorrow?”
David shook his head. ‘The cave is dry right now, but we don’t know what it’s like when it rains. If water flows over the guano, that’s bad, it will leach out the nitrates. The guano will still be good as fertilizer, but that’s not what we’re looking for right now.”
“So we want a cave that’s dry year-round.”
“Well, no running water under the bat roosts,” David qualified. “It’s okay if there’s a slow seep—that’s what keeps the stalactites and stalagmites growing—since then the dissolved nitrates don’t travel far before the water evaporates. In fact, seeping water might be a good thing, as the nitrates will precipitate out as a white powder.”
* * *
David’s expedition spent a month with the Lopinoteans and explored three more caves in the area. They had to access Lopinot Cave #2 by a crawl space that was just sixteen inches high, and because the entrance was so narrow, the chamber beyond was in essentially total darkness. Nonetheless, they were rewarded with dry chambers containing thousands of bats and a floor covered with dry bat guano. Unfortunately, the guano had also attracted a large number of giant cockroaches, and it was unpleasant just walking in the chambers. Everyone was glad that they didn’t have to crawl where the insects were feasting.
They entered Lopinot Cave #3 by a fifteen-foot sinkhole with a talus cone at the bottom. The sinkhole walls had handholds and footholds enough to be climbable, but David deemed it best to play it safe and carry out a rope descent. The sinkhole was connected to several additional chambers. Bats were plentiful, as was guano, but the drip rate after it had rained for two days was high. They took guano samples anyway.
The final cave, Lopinot Cave #4, was a walk-in. There was a small colony of bats, and some guano, but David was skeptical that this cave would prove of value as there were signs of water through-flow.
Fort Plymouth
May, 320 BCE
It was May—nearly the end of the dry season—when David’s expedition returned to Fort Plymouth.
“So when will we know whether the bat guano is any good?” asked David.
“Soon,” said Amanda. “We have a chemist working on recreating something called the Kjeldahl method for nitrogen analysis. And from that we can calculate the potential saltpeter yield.”
“Why didn’t you have that done while I was training my team or gallivanting around northern Trinidad?”
“Because we are short of everything. Short on chemists, short on equipment, short on raw materials. The only real chemist in Fort Plymouth right now—that is, one who worked as a chemist before the Event—has a dozen projects, all needed yesterday. For a nitrogen assay, I was told, we needed to make sulfuric acid, potassium sulfate, sodium hydroxide, hydrochloric acid, and pH indicator dye, in known concentrations, and find the right catalyst for the conversion of amine nitrogen into ammonium ions. We also needed to make the lab glassware. Bear in mind that the Queen didn’t have a chemistry laboratory, and we lost access to most of its resources when it sailed back to Europe. The assay was low priority until you came back with the guano.”
“So be it,” said David. “What should I do in the meantime? Plan an expedition to the Mount Tamana region?”
Amanda considered this suggestion. “Not just yet. Give your caving team a break, a chance to catch up with other stuff. And there’s plenty of demand for your carpentry skills right now.”
June, 320 BCE
The assay results for Lopinot Caves One and Two were quite favorable. The colony’s chemist estimated that they would be able to make on average at least four pounds of saltpeter from every hundred pounds of guano. The guano from Cave Three produced only half that quantity. And the guano from Cave Four was suitable only for fertilizer, which was a pity, as it had the easiest access.
The next step was for David to guide Samuel Leadbetter, a passenger who had owned his own construction firm, to the cave. He would be in overall charge of the guano mining operation, among other projects. He needed to see the caves in order to decide what site modifications were needed for guano mining to be practical—assuming it could be made practical at all.
Both caves had passageways that would need to be enlarged, whether with explosives or with pick and shovel. David warned him that the demolition crew should wear respirators or masks, as fresh bat droppings might contain spores of the fungus Histoplasma capsulatum, and their work could send the spores airborne. Breathing in the spores could result in pneumonia-like histoplasmosis, known as “cave disease.” David had no idea whether that fungus was present in Trinidad, but he wanted to make sure Sam knew about it.
Leadbetter also had to check the condition of the roof and floor—for hazards such as falling rock, or pits to trip and fall into. There needed to be adequate lighting without depleting the oxygen supply in the cave. And so on and so forth.
Unfortunately, by the time the chemist finished the assays of the guano samples, it was already June, and they were faced with torrential rains. No one wanted to travel far in the wild under those conditions. So they waited until December, when the rains were slacking off.
December, 320 BCE
Since they knew where they were going and the landmarks to watch out for, and water levels were high enough to use Miss Anne and Miss Betty while on the Caroni, this trip took less time.
They sounded out the Lopinoteans as to their willingness to mine guano and received a series of polite refusals. It wasn’t a surprise. They would be working by lantern light in a confined space, with high temperature and humidity and an acrid smell from the guano.
Ship people were even less likely than the Akpoka to engage in guano mining. Almost certainly, the guano miners would be indentured servants, bought from the Suthic or the Carthaginians. Or criminals or prisoners sentenced to hard labor, although the legality of that was open to question.
January, 319 BCE
Plans for the guano mining were well underway when one of the ex-passengers knocked on the door of David’s home. When he answered, she demanded to know, “Are you the idiot that is planning to despoil bat caves in the Northern Range?”
“It is true that I found bat caves . . .” David responded cautiously. “Who are you?”
“I am Anna Comfort, and I am the representative of Northern Trinidad in the Congress of New America. And I insist you cease this activity until a proper study of its environmental impact may be conducted.”
“Actually, I am not involved in the guano mining. And in finding the caves, I acted under orders from President Wiley of New America.”
“Acting under orders, huh?” Anna sniffed. “Where have we heard that before? Nazi Germany?”
David shook his head. “Look, you don’t like the idea, you need to talk to President Wiley.”
“Rest assured that I will.”
* * *
David decided that he had better talk to Amanda Miller, to see if she could pull Anna’s fangs.
“Excuse me, Miz Miller, but someone named Anna Comfort has been giving me a hard time about the guano mining project. She insists that we stop it so we don’t hurt the bats.”
“Anna Dis-Comfort, eh?” Amanda muttered. “She thinks she’s the governor of Northern Trinidad, but she’s just one of its representatives in Congress. I’ll take care of her.”
Something about David’s reaction gave her pause. “What’s wrong?”
“I know that the bat guano is a critical resource for making saltpeter and therefore gunpowder, but I do appreciate where she’s coming from,” said David. “In the Philippines, where I come from, there were over a hundred caves that were closed to the general public. Not just to protect the bats, but other wildlife, and also the geological formations.”
“But there were still some caves that anyone could visit?” asked Amanda.
“Sure. There were at least forty that you could visit not just for the thrill, or to see the formations, but also to collect guano for fertilizer and bird’s nests for soup.”
“It sounds like in the Philippines that you had a lot more caves to choose from than we do in Trinidad. At least, caves we know about.”
“That’s true. Actually, we had a couple of thousand, but a lot of them hadn’t been classified.”
Amanda stroked her chin. “Okay, why don’t you and Samuel Leadbetter sit down with Michael Lockwood? He’s our go-to person for any environmental issues.”
“We’ll do that.”
* * *
Lockwood leaned back in his chair. “David, I understand that you were a member of a Philippine caving organization. What environmental concerns were raised about people entering bat caves to harvest guano?”
“Lights and noise disturb bats. Smoke from torches can suffocate bats or set the guano on fire. And changes to the entrance might change the temperature and humidity in the cave in a way that the bats don’t like.”
“What was proposed to protect the bats?”
“First, if the bats are migratory, then harvest the guano when they’re not around.”
Lockwood made a note. “Do we know whether these bats are migratory?”
“No. There isn’t much change in temperature in Trinidad, so if they are, it is probably because of a change in food supply associated with the change between the rainy and the dry seasons.”
“‘The bats eat insects, right?”
“It depends on the species. Some eat fruit. But both can vary with the season.”
“The dry season is January to May, and that’s when you first discovered the caves,” said Lockwood. “The rainy season is June to December, and that’s when you went back with George.”
“Well, we waited until the end of the rainy season, but yes.”
“And you saw the same bat population densities?”
“Pretty much, although we didn’t take a count.”
“Then I think we need to assume that these bats aren’t migratory. So what’s the next best option?”
“Almost all bats are nocturnal, even the fruit bats. They leave at sunset and return at sunrise. So do the harvesting when they are out on the prowl.”
Lockwood turned to Leadbetter. “Is that feasible?”
“Well, we need light inside the cave even in the daytime, so sure.”
“You need to wait to turn on the lights until all the bats have flown off,” added David.
“Let me think,” muttered Leadbetter. “Since we’re in the tropics, the length of the day is almost constant, about twelve hours. Take off an hour on each end for bat transit, and that’s ten hours, which is a pretty long work day.”
“You’re probably going to have people working an hour on, an hour off, that whole period,” said David. “The conditions are oppressive.”
“I suppose we can live with that.”
‘What about the issue of disturbing the bats when you change the access?” asked Lockwood.
“Do as little as you can get away with,” suggested David.
“Suppose we were to enlarge the entrances but put in some sort of Dutch door, so that when the miners aren’t at work, we leave just the top section open to mimic the natural condition?” asked Leadbetter. “We could even construct a sort of airlock, with Dutch doors at each end, if we had to.”
David grimaced. “I am sure that would help reduce the impact on the bats, I just can’t say how much.”
Lockwood liked the idea anyway. “But what about the lighting? Can we avoid using lanterns and torches inside the caves?”
“Sure,” grumbled Leadbetter, “if we want to use up our irreplaceable LED lights and batteries.”
“We do have rechargeable batteries. Even some solar chargers,” protested Lockwood. “And aren’t the LED lights good for something like 25,000 hours? Even 50,000? By the time they die, we’ll probably be able to make LEDs in this timeline.”
“I am not sure I would make that assumption,” said Leadbetter. “But aren’t there some woods that burn with very little smoke? Ash, oak, maple . . .”
Lockwood cut him off. “Even if we find wood like that here, the problem isn’t just the smoke, it’s the depletion of oxygen and production of carbon dioxide that we need to worry about.”
“And not just on account of the bats . . .”
* * *
Lockwood submitted an environmental impact statement to President Wiley who, “as a courtesy,” shared it with Anna Comfort.
As feared and expected, she was not mollified and managed to persuade a committee of the Congress of New America to hold a hearing on the “impact of guano mining.”
Anna Comfort was not the chair of the committee, and President Wiley had sufficient clout with the chair to make sure that the first panel was of people who would talk about the benefit of guano mining—the strategic advantage of having a domestic source of saltpeter for gunpowder manufacture and the economic value of even the discarded phosphate-rich material as fertilizer for crops.
Anna tried to argue that the contract between the Lopinoteans and the colony was unfair to the former. However, even the Akpara on the committee were unmoved. The Akpara thought of themselves more as a culture than as a nation or tribe. Each village was an independent polity. If the Lopinoteans didn’t negotiate the best possible deal for themselves, then the rest of the Akpara simply didn’t care. If anything, they were a little envious that the Lopinoteans had this resource and they didn’t. Their concern was that the Lopinoteans not get a special deal on gunpowder. And the principal concern of the other franchised tribes—the Kapoi and the Kaluga—was that the Akpara in general didn’t get a special deal on gunpowder.
Some of the ship people did want to make sure that the contract wasn’t exploitative, but one of the witnesses explained that it was similar to the deals made for access to oil fields in southern Trinidad.
David Palacio, Samuel Leadbetter, and Michael Lockwood were on the second panel of witnesses and from the beginning were treated by Anna as hostile witnesses. However, other congressmen were rather more sympathetic to the project.
The general attitude toward bats among the ship people was a mix of “bats are rats with wings,” “bats are good because they eat mosquitoes,” and “bats are blood suckers.”
The Trinidadians were rather more knowledgeable about bats. Bats were found all over Trinidad, they just didn’t live in caves in the south (because there weren’t any). And there were two things that bothered them about bats: they ate wild fruit (that the Trinidadians would rather gather and eat themselves) and some species—yes, vampire bats—attacked people.
Their view was that it made sense to make some effort at protecting the bats so they would keep producing guano. But they weren’t about to elevate the interests of bats over those of human beings.
Anna then pressed for a third panel, this time of medical people, to talk about the health risks to the miners. The panelists talked about histoplasmosis and also about the possible transmission of rabies by bats, especially vampire bats. There was a Wikipedia article reporting that white-winged vampire bats had transmitted rabies on modern Trinidad.
David was recalled to testify as to whether there were vampire bats in any of the caves that were earmarked for guano mining. He pointed out that no one in the expedition had been bitten by bats during their explorations and that the Wikipedia article on Lopinot cave said that the cave had been used to study the behavior of the Greater Spear-Nosed Bat and made no reference to vampire bats.
After the hearing, Anna Comfort introduced a bill to ban guano mining on Trinidad. It was voted down in committee.
* * *
Sometime later, David was buttonholed by Lacula, who was now a congressman. “You told me that your Wikipedia said that there were bat caves in central Trinidad, in Kapoi country?”
“That’s right, on the north slope of Mount Tamana.”
“Well, I have some Kapoi friends who would like you to go there. On their behalf.”
“Is that going to get me in trouble with President Wiley?”
Lacula shook his head. “Oh, no. President Wiley is perfectly happy to entertain a proposal from the Kapoi where they share in the expenses of the expedition and the subsequent profits. Especially since it means that there will be competition with the Akpara.”
David thought about what he had read about the bat caves of Mount Tamana. It was supposed to be an eighteen-section cave system, with eleven different bat species permanently roosting in the caves. There was supposed to be a subterranean stream, too, but some cave areas were dry. It sounded like Paradise to a caving enthusiast like himself.
“Well, then . . . Mount Tamana, here I come!”
* * *
