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speak.”
    â€œOur boats, Father?” Ari asked.
    â€œThe British Expeditionary Force— our boats.”

chapter four
Maxi
    North China Sea Mid-November 1841
    The grease-covered man swore viciously as blood shot from the gash on his hand and splatted against the exposed pistons of the steam engine. His cussing startled the English mariners in charge of the boiler room and engine, not because they were unused to foul language, but because the angry expletives were in a polyglot of Farsi, Hindi, cockney English, and a language none could identify—Yiddish.
    The man’s extraordinary linguistic tirade finally ended with a triple denunciation of the female genitalia, all in Farsi, preceded by a very common English verb used in its all too common gerundial form. Then theman took the red kerchief from his neck, swiped the blood from his hand across his filthy shirt, and said, “Start her up, gents. See if my blood larded her enough.”
    Moments later the damnable engine turned over and HMS Nemesis, for the first time in a day and a half, began to move. The men gave a cheer for the odd, red-haired Baghdadi Jew whom they knew only by his Christian name, Maxi.
    Maxi Hordoon smiled, his large white teeth seeming even whiter in his grease-smeared face. He gave the engine a little kick with his boot and headed for the deck. Under his breath he said, “Fuckin’ steamboats almost did us in, they did.”
    And they had. Years earlier, in a desperate move to increase their opium sales to northern China, Richard, over Maxi’s objections, had leased two sidewheeler steamers.
    â€œThey’re garbage, brother mine,” Maxi had said.
    â€œBut they can make three round trips from Canton to northern China before the weather sets in,” Richard had claimed, “as opposed to the two that’s the maximum for even the fastest clipper. Come on, Maxi, think what we could do with fifty percent more profit each year. Fifty percent more, Maxi!”
    Despite his reservations and his well-earned fear of monsoon season at sea, Maxi said, “Let me at least take a look at these new mechanical marvels before you throw our money away.”
    Maxi examined the two sidewheelers, and although they were better than the ones constructed by Miller and Symington, they weren’t as secure as Henry Bell’s version, called the Comet. Maxi spent almost a week with the boiler men, concerned about the transfer ofsteam to the pistons. Then he questioned the use of sea water in the boilers but was assured that as long as the boilers were cleaned after each trip, the salt residue wouldn’t hurt the mechanism. He nodded but wasn’t thrilled.
    In the end, Richard leased two of the steamships from their agent in Hong Kong, Barclays Bank of London.
    Things went well at first, but the turnaround time after each leg of the trip was just barely enough to give the boilers a cursory cleaning, so that the last leg of the third trip took longer—a lot longer than expected. Less than a day’s steaming from the Bogue entrance to Canton, the monsoon caught up with them.
    Maxi did his best to get more speed from the engine, but the salt residue buildup in the boiler proved too much. They just couldn’t outrun the storm. It fell on them with a fury that felt personal. The tilt of the boat in the mountainous waves pulled the paddlewheel out of the water over and over again. Then the sea snapped open the hatches and quickly swamped them. Maxi could still feel the swirling water rising around him as he tried to restart the engine of the lead ship. But the water had gotten into the piston shafts, and the boiler fires had been snuffed out by the cold sea water.
    Maxi was the last to leave the ship. He had actually considered going down with it, then thought better of it. “God’d laugh if I died in this piece of crap,” he said as he dove off the stern of the sinking vessel.
    He and Richard lost not