Neal Stephenson - The Baroque Cycle 03 - The System of the World

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Table of Contents
TheSystemoftheWorld
THE System OF THE WORLD
Contents
The story thus far…
Book 6
Solomon’s Gold
Dartmoor
Crockern Tor
The Saracen’s Head
Southern England
Crane Court
London
Mr. White’s Baiting-Ring
Orney’s Ship-yard, Rotherhithe
A Subterranean Vault in Clerkenwell
Bloomsbury
Sir Isaac Newton’s House,St. Martin’s Street, London
Leicester House
The Kit-Cat Clubb
Crane Court, London
River Thames
Lieutenant’s Lodging, the Tower of London
Sloop Atalanta, Gravesend
Cold Harbour
Sloop Atalanta, the Hope
The Monument, London
Sloop Atalanta, off the Isle of Grain
Lieutenant’s Lodging, the Tower of London
The City of London
Sloop Atalanta, off the Shive
The Monument
Worth’s Coffee-house, Birchin Lane, London
Shive Tor
The White Tower
Shive Tor
Book 7
Currency
Hanover
Westminster Palace
Garden of Herrenhausen Palace, Hanover
Princess Caroline’s Bedchamber,Herrenhausen Palace
Between Black Mary’s Hole andSir John Oldcastle’s, North of London
Clerkenwell Court
Westminster Palace
Westminster Palace
The Kit-Cat Clubb
The Carriage
The Launch Prudence
Royal Society, Crane Court
Clerkenwell Court
Golden Square
Leicester House
Newgate Prison
Golden Square
The Black Dogg, Newgate Prison
Monmouth Street
Leicester Fields
The Black Dogg, Newgate Prison
Bolingbroke’s House, Golden Square
The Italian Opera
Golden Square
Billingsgate Dock
Sophia, Mouth of the Thames
Orney’s Ship-yard, Rotherhithe
Billingsgate Dock
A Tavern, Hockley-in-the-Hole
Book 8
The System of the World
Marlborough House
The Temple of Vulcan
The Kit-Cat Clubb
Orney’s Ship-yard, Rotherhithe
Surrey
Library of Leicester House
London Bridge
Greenwich
Roger Comstock’s House
The Castle, Newgate Prison
The Black Dogg of Newgate
Fleet Prison
The Tap-Room, Fleet Prison
Under a Pile of Lead Weights, the Press-Room,Newgate Prison
Westminster Abbey
The Court of the Old Bailey
The Tower of London
A Letter
Mint Street, the Tower of London
A Letter
The Condemned Hold, Newgate Prison
The Gallows, Tower Hill
The Press-Yard and Castle, Newgate Prison
Clerkenwell Court
The Chapel, Newgate Prison
Halfway Along Cheapside
Poop Deck of Minerva, the Pool of London
The Temple of Vulcan
Newgate Prison
Sir Isaac Newton’s House in St. Martin’s
Friday
29 October 1714
Westminster Abbey
Chapel of Newgate Prison
New Palace Yard, Westminster
The Stone Anvil, the High Hall,Newgate Prison
The Trial of the Pyx
The Press-Yard, Newgate Prison
Star Chamber
Church of St. Sepulchre
Star Chamber
Holbourn
Star Chamber
Epilogs
Leibniz-Haus, Hanover
Gardens of Trianon,Royal Château of Versailles
Blenheim Palace
Carolina
Cornwall
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also byNeal Stephenson
Credits
About the Publisher
††Queen Anne.
‡‡An allusion to a myth in which an angry Vulcan fashioned a trick throne containing hidden restraints,
and gave it to his mother, Juno; when she sat on it, she was trapped, and only Vulcan could release her.
*Partry.
*In honor of Lady Anne Sunderland, the daughter of the Duke of Marlborough.
*As everyone in the room knew, Leibniz was using the wordanimal in an ancient and somewhat technical
sense of something animated, i.e., possessing, or possessed by, an anima, or spirit.
*Females who are found guilty of High Treason are punished thus, rather than being subjected to the
indecency of what is about to happen to Jack.
*George Augustus of Hanover, later George II.
*A.k.a. James Stuart, “The Pretender,” son of the late former King James II, and would-be James III.
*One of the English titles of that same George Augustus of Hanover.
*Roger Comstock, Marquis of Ravenscar.
†The Kit-Cat Clubb.
‡An allusion to the lightning-bolts forged by Vulcan; alternately, perhaps, golden guineas turned out by
the Mint, which was no longer under Roger’s direction since Oxford and Bolingbroke had overthrown
the Whig Juncto, but still run by men associated with Roger, such as Newton.
§Jupiter, to whom Vulcan supplied lightning-bolts; but possibly a cheeky allusion to George Louis of
Hanover, for whom, it was hoped, the Mint would soon be turning out guineas.
**Bolingbroke.
THE
System
OF THE
WORLD
VOL. III of
THEBAROQUE CYCLE
Neal Stephenson
To Mildred
Contents
The story thus far…
EPIGRAPH
BOOKSIX
Solomon’s Gold
BOOKSEVEN
Currency
BOOKEIGHT
The System of the World
EPILOGS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THEAUTHOR
ALSO BYNEALSTEPHENSON
CREDITS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THEPUBLISHER
But first whom shall we send
In search of this new world, whom shall we find
Sufficient? Who shall tempt with wandring feet
The dark unbottom’d infinite Abyss
And through the palpable obscure find out
His uncouth way, or spread his aerie flight
Upborn with indefatigable wings
Over the vast abrupt, ere he arrive
The happy Ile…
MILTON,Paradise Lost
The story thus far…
In Boston in October 1713, Daniel Waterhouse, sixty-seven years of age, the Founder and sole Fellow
of a failing college, the Massachusetts Bay Colony of Technologickal Arts, has received a startling visit
from the Alchemist Enoch Root, who has appeared on his doorstep brandishing a summons addressed to
Daniel from Princess Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach, thirty.
Two decades earlier, Daniel, along with his friend and colleague Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, knew
Princess Caroline when she was a destitute orphan. Since then she has grown up as a ward of the King
and Queen of Prussia in the Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin, surrounded by books, artists, and Natural
Philosophers, including Leibniz. She has married the Electoral Prince of Hanover, George Augustus,
known popularly as “Young Hanover Brave” for his exploits in the recently concluded War of the
Spanish Succession. He is reputed to be as handsome and dashing as Caroline is beautiful and brilliant.
The grandmother of George Augustus is Sophie of Hanover, still shrewd and vigorous at eighty-three.
According to the Whigs—one of the two great factions in English politics—Sophie should be next in line
to the English throne after the death of Queen Anne, who is forty-eight and in poor health. This would
place Princess Caroline in direct line to become Princess of Wales and later Queen of England. The
Whigs’ bitter rivals, the Tories, while paying lip service to the Hanoverian succession, harbor many
powerful dissidents, called Jacobites, who are determined that the next monarch should instead be James
Stuart: a Catholic who has lived most of his life in France as a guest and puppet of the immensely
powerful Sun King, Louis XIV.
England and an alliance of mostly Protestant countries have just finished fighting a quarter-century-long
world war against France. The second half of it, known as the War of the Spanish Succession, has seen
many battlefield victories for the Allies under the generalship of two brothers in arms: the Duke of
Marlborough and Prince Eugene of Savoy. Nevertheless France has won the war, in large part by
outmaneuvering her opponents politically. Consequently, a grandson of Louis XIV now sits on the throne
of the Spanish Empire, which among other things is the source of most of the world’s gold and silver. If
the English Jacobites succeed in placing James Stuart on the English throne, France’s victory will be total.
In anticipation of the death of Queen Anne, Whiggish courtiers and politicians have been establishing
contacts and forging alliances between London and Hanover. This has had the side-effect of throwing
into high relief a long-simmering dispute between Sir Isaac Newton—the preëminent English scientist, the
President of the Royal Society, and Master of the Royal Mint at the Tower of London—and Leibniz, a
privy councilor and old friend of Sophie, and tutor to Princess Caroline. Ostensibly this conflict is about
which of the two men first invented the calculus, but in truth it has deeper roots. Newton and Leibniz are
both Christians, troubled that many of their fellow Natural Philosophers perceive a conflict between the
mechanistic world-view of science and the tenets of their faith. Both men have developed theories to
harmonize science and religion. Newton’s is based on the ancient proto-science of Alchemy and
Leibniz’s is based on a theory of time, space, and matter called Monadology. They are radically different
and probably irreconcilable.
Princess Caroline wishes to head off any possible conflict between the world’s two greatest savants, and
the political and religious complications that would ensue from it. She has asked Daniel, who is an old
friend of both Newton and Leibniz, to journey back to England, leaving his young wife and their little boy
in Boston, and mediate the dispute. Daniel, knowing Newton’s vindictiveness, sees this as foreordained
to fail, but agrees to give it a try, largely because he is impoverished and the Princess has held out the
incentive of a large life insurance policy.
Daniel departs from Boston onMinerva,a Dutch East Indiaman (a heavily armed merchant ship).
Detained along the New England coast by contrary winds, she falls under attack in Cape Cod Bay from
the formidable pirate-fleet of Captain Edward Teach, a.k.a. Blackbeard, who somehow knows that Dr.
Waterhouse is on board Minerva,and demands that her Captain, Otto Van Hoek, hand him over.
Captain Van Hoek, who loathes pirates even more than the typical merchant-captain, elects to fight it
out, and bests Teach’s pirate fleet in a day-long engagement.
Minervacrosses the Atlantic safely but is caught in a storm off the southwest corner of England and
nearly cast away on the Isles of Scilly. Late in December she puts in at Plymouth for repairs. Dr.
Waterhouse goes ashore intending to travel to London by land. In Plymouth he encounters a family friend
named Will Comstock.
Will is the grandson of John Comstock, a Tory nobleman who fought against Cromwell in the middle of
the previous century and, after the Restoration, came back to England and helped found the Royal
Society. Subsequently, John was disgraced and forced to retire from public life, partly through the
machinations of his (much younger) distant cousin and bitter rival, Roger Comstock. Daniel served as a
tutor in Natural Philosophy to one of the sons of John. This son later moved to Connecticut and
established an estate there. Will was born and grew up on that estate but has lately moved back to
England, where he has found a home in the West Country. He is a moderate Tory who has recently been
created Earl of Lostwithiel. Queen Anne has recently been forced to create a large number of such titles
in order to pack the House of Lords with Tories, the party that she currently favors.
Daniel has spent the twelve days of Christmas with Will’s family at his seat near Lostwithiel, and Will has
talked him into making a small detour en route to London.
Book 6
Solomon’s Gold
Dartmoor
15JANUARY 1714
In life there is nothing more foolish than inventing.
—JAMESWATT
“MEN HALF YOUR AGEand double your weight have been slain on these wastes by Extremity of
Cold,” said the Earl of Lostwithiel, Lord Warden of the Stannaries, and Rider of the Forest and Chase of
Dartmoor, to one of his two fellow-travelers.
The wind had paused, as though Boreas had exhausted his lungs and was drawing in a new breath of air
from somewhere above Iceland. So the young Earl was able to say this in matter-of-fact tones. “Mr.
Newcomen and I are very glad of your company, but—”
The wind struck them all deaf, as though the three men were candle-flames to be blown out. They
staggered, planted their downwind feet against the black, stony ground, and leaned into it. Lostwithiel
shouted: “We’ll not think you discourteous if you return to my coach!” He nodded to a black carriage
stopped along the track a short distance away, rocking on its French suspension. It had been artfully
made to appear lighter than it was, and looked as if the only thing preventing it from tumbling
end-over-end across the moor was the motley team of draught-horses harnessed to it, shaggy manes
standing out horizontally in the gale.
“I am astonished that you should call this an extremity of cold,” answered the old man. “In Boston, as
you know, this would pass without remark. I am garbed for Boston.” He was shrouded in a rustic leather
cape, which he parted in the front to reveal a lining pieced together from the pelts of many raccoons.
“After that passage through the intestinal windings of the Gorge of Lyd, we are all in want of fresh
air—especially, if I read the signs rightly, Mr. Newcomen.”
That was all the leave Thomas Newcomen wanted. His face, which was as pale as the moon, bobbed
once, which was as close as this Dartmouth blacksmith would ever come to a formal bow. Having thus
taken his leave, he turned his broad back upon them and trudged quickly downwind. Soon he became
hard to distinguish from the numerous upright boulders—which might be read as a comment on his
physique, or on the gloominess of the day, or on the badness of Daniel’s eyesight.
“The Druids loved to set great stones on end,” commented the Earl. “For what purpose, I cannot
imagine.”
“You have answered the question by asking it.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Dwelling as they did in this God-forsaken place, they did it so that men would come upon these
standing stones two thousand years after they were dead, and know they had been here. The Duke of
Marlborough, throwing up that famous Pile of Blenheim Palace, is no different.”
The Earl of Lostwithiel felt it wise to let this pass without comment. He turned and kicked a path through
some stiff withered grass to a strange up-cropping of lichen-covered stone. Following him, Daniel
understood it as one corner of a ruined building. The ground yielded under their feet. It was spread thin
over a shambles of tumbledown rafters and disintegrating peat-turves. Anyway the angle gave them
shelter from the wind.
“Speaking now in my capacity as Lord Warden of the Stannaries, I welcome you to Dartmoor, Daniel
Waterhouse, on behalf of the Lord of the Manor.”
Daniel sighed. “If I’d been in London the last twenty years, keeping up with my Heraldic Arcana, and
going to tea with the Bluemantle Pursuivant, I would know who the hell that was. But as matters stand—”
“Dartmoor was created part of the Duchy of Cornwall in 1338, and as such became part of the
possessions of the Prince of Wales—a title created by King Edward I in—”
“So in a roundabout way, you are welcoming me on behalf of the Prince of Wales,” Daniel said abruptly,
in a bid to yank the Earl back before he rambled any deeper into the labyrinth of feudal hierarchy.
“And the Princess. Who, if the Hanovers come, shall be—”
“Princess Caroline of Ansbach. Yes. Her name keeps coming up. Did she send you to track me down in
the streets of Plymouth?”
The Earl looked a little wounded. “I am the son of your old friend. I encountered you by luck. My
surprise was genuine. The welcome given you by my wife and children was unaffected. If you doubt it,
come to our housenext Christmas.”
“Then why do you go out of your way to bring up the Princess?”
“Only because I wish to be plain-spoken. Where you are going next it is all intrigue. There is a sickness
of the mind that comes over those who bide too long in London, which causes otherwise rational men to
put forced and absurd meanings on events that are accidental.”
“I have observed that sickness in full flower,” Daniel allowed, thinking of one man in particular.
“I do not wish you to think, six months from now, when you become aware of all this, ‘Aha, the Earl of
Lostwithiel was nothing more than a cat’s paw for Caroline—who knows what other lies he may have
told me!’ ”
“Very well. For you to disclose it now exhibits wisdom beyond your years.”
“Some would call ittimidity originating in the disasters that befell my father, and his father.”
“I do not take that view of it,” Daniel said curtly.
He was startled by bulk and motion to one side, and feared it was a standing-stone toppled by the wind;
but it was only Thomas Newcomen, looking a good deal pinker. “God willing, that carriage-ride is the
closest I shall ever come to a sea-voyage!” he declared.
“May the Lord so bless you,” Daniel returned. “In the storms of the month past, we were pitched and
tossed about so much that all hands were too sick to eat for days. I went from praying we wouldnot run
aground, to praying that wewould .” Daniel paused to draw breath as the other two laughed. Newcomen
had brought out a clay-pipe and tobacco-pouch, and Lostwithiel now did the same. The Earl clapped his
hands to draw his coachman’s eye, and signalled that fire should be brought out.
Daniel declined the tobacco with a wave of his hand. “One day that Indian weed will kill more white
men, than white men have killed Indians.”
“But not today,” Newcomen said.
If this fifty-year-old blacksmith seemed strangely blunt and direct in the presence of an Earl, it was
because he and that Earl had been working together for a year, building something. “The balance of the
voyage was easier, I trust, Dr. Waterhouse?”
“When the weather lifted, those horrid rocks were in sight. As we sailed past them, we said a prayer for
Sir Cloudesley Shovell and the two thousand soldiers who died there coming home from the Spanish
front. And seeing men at work on the shore, we took turns peering through a perspective-glass, and saw
them combing the strand withrakes .”
The Earl nodded knowingly at this and so Daniel turned towards Newcomen, who looked
curious—though, come to think of it, healways looked curious when he was not in the middle of throwing
up. “You see,” Daniel continued, “many a ship has gone down near the Isles of Scilly laden with Pieces
of Eight, and sometimes a great tempest will cause the sea to vomit up silver onto dry land.”
The unfortunate choice of verb caused the blacksmith to flinch. The Earl stepped in with a little jest:
“That’s the only silver that will find its way onto English soil as long as the Mint over-pays for gold.”
“I wish I had understood as much when I reached Plymouth!” Daniel said. “All I had in my purse was
Pieces of Eight. Porters, drivers, innkeepers leapt after them like starving dogs—I fear I paid double or
treble foreverything at first.”
“What embarrassed you in Plymouth inns, may enrich you here, a few miles north,” said the Earl.
“It does not seem a propitious location,” Daniel said. “The poor folk who lived here could not even keep
their roof off the floor.”
“No one livedhere —this was what the Old Men call a jews-house. It means that there was a lode
nearby,” said the Earl.
Newcomen added, “Over yonder by that little brook I saw the ruins of a trip-hammer, for crushing the
shode.” Having got his pipe lit, he thrust his free hand into a pocket and pulled out a black stone about
the size of a bun. He let it roll into Daniel’s hand. It was heavy, and felt colder than the air. “Feel its
weight, Dr. Waterhouse. That is black tin. Such was brought here, where we are standing, and melted in
a peat-fire. White tin ran out the bottom into a box hewn from granite, and when it cooled, what came
out was a block of the pure metal.”
The Earl had his pipe blazing now too, which gave him a jovial, donnish affect, in spite of the fact that (1)
he was all of twenty-three years old, and (2) he was wearing clothes that had gone out of fashion three
hundred years ago, and furthermore was bedizened with diverse strange ancient artifacts, viz. some
heraldic badges, a tin peat-saw, and a tiny bavin of scrub-oak twigs. “This is where I enter into it, or
rather my predecessors do,” he remarked. “The block tin would be packed down the same sort of
appalling road we just came up, to one of the four Stannary towns.” The Earl paused to grope among the
clanking array of fetishes dangling from chains round his neck, and finally came up with a crusty old
chisel-pointed hammer which he waved menacingly in the air—and unlike most Earls, he looked as if he
might have actually used a hammer for some genuine purpose during his life. “The assayer would remove
a corner from each block, and test its purity. An archaic word for ‘corner’ is ‘coign,’ whence we get, for
example, ‘quoin’—”
Daniel nodded. “The wedge that gunners use, aboard ship, to elevate a cannon, is so called.”
“This came to be known asquoinage . And thence, our queer English word ‘coin,’ which bears no
relation to any French or Latin words, or German. Our Continental friends say, loosely translated, ‘a
piece of money,’ but we English—”
“Stop.”
“Is my discourse annoying to you, Dr. Waterhouse?”
摘要：

TableofContentsTheSystemoftheWorldTHESystemOFTHEWORLDContentsThestorythusfar…Book6Solomon’sGoldDartmoorCrockernTorTheSaracen’sHeadSouthernEnglandCraneCourtLondonMr.White’sBaiting-RingOrney’sShip-yard,RotherhitheASubterraneanVaultinClerkenwellBloomsburySirIsaacNewton’sHouse,St.Martin’sStreet,LondonLe...

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