Captain Richard Francis Burton stood upon the deck of the ketch as it was poled across this miserable excuse for a harbor, the shallow-bottomed expanse of squalid anchorage that had for its only advantage the fact that an invader would need a top German breech-loading, rifled cannon to shell the passably erected architecture of this faux European outpost upon the great southern pampas of Argentina.

The four Italian brutes who poled this heavy sea sled across the vast shallow harbor seemed dumb to the world, immersed in their wretched tasks. Burton, flushed with imperial Anglo-Saxon pride and imbued with the gypsy mirth he had imbibed from those travelling folk who he had camped with in his youth, broke into Romany, “Pull, my good fellows, the object of your drudgery is more appreciative than the livestock that normally passes for freight in these environs.”

Not one of these dreary souls even raised their eyes to his sardonically masked visage.

“Indeed, if I had been served by the likes of you in Somalia, I surely would have been abandoned to the tender mercies of those savages, perhaps even sold, no?”

Still, even the questioning tone of his was ignored. Something sunk in his stomach. Was it the realization that he was no longer even skilled at provoking the Lower Orders? No, it was the sunrise, streaking the horizon unkindly to the east, over his left shoulder.

With the morning sun, off center to his back, warming his deeply scarred left cheek, his gaze was drawn seaward, past the red-shadowed figures of the few small ships ringing the shallows and through the filament sails of the fishing boats and the hanging rigging of their greater cousins, to rest upon a sanguine sea. The mighty South Atlantic surely awaited a mariner feast somewhere along its wicked breadth this day.

Pulling his magnetic eyes away from the sun suffused horizon, he recited The Day Break prayer in his most reverent Arabic—not manipulating or molesting it like he did with his mother tongue. Then, on further consideration, thought it best to invoke his dear Wife’s kindly soul and say The Lord’s Prayer in Latin, for those who poled. He might have said it in Italian, so that they might consider the words. But then they might forget their place, a place much deeper down the human pecking order than the rarified—if reviled—place where he perched above the melancholy world.

To this, the men nodded respectably as they poled onward, somewhat more strongly now, toward what the good Doctor Pike had assured him would be his reinvigorating Mecca of the flesh. Recovering from the vile, liver-infecting diseases of the tropics that had attacked him more savagely than malaria had in the East African highlands, had been a grueling process, his recuperative powers not what they had been in decades gone by.

The four strong men poled deliberately for seven miles through these miserable shallows with him as their lone cargo.

Within sight was the shore cart, a ramshackle trolley running from dry land into the harbor shallows, the docking gate set in three feet of pustule-drainage quality water, the festering scent of which was already assaulting his nostrils, for the waste of man, beast and bath all drained—apparently—into the harbor! He would soon have the honor of riding ashore on a half-submerged cart as some wretched member of the lower orders dragged him and his bags to shore through the hip-deep muck.

He stood and stewed, glowering in his towering rage, emanating his simmering high dungeon of the eye that had made natives grovel and many a well-heeled Englishman question the question on their lips, as the ketch neared its destination: a half-sunken, slimy-wooded rolling seat, with a trailing cart for his baggage. The cart was a two seat affair. No other of these stations were manned, leaving him to believe that the men of this ketch had a relationship with the owner of this contraption, the little white man with the pimply face and beaver hat that sat where his wife would have, looking out to sea.

When they were within hailing distance the man introduced himself as Fergusson, a certain Scottish son of an alehouse whore no doubt, and occupied the intervening minutes with a litany of those establishments he recommends for dining, drinking, sleeping and other accommodations that might concern the travelling man.

“Sir Richard Burton, welcome to Buenos Aires!” exclaimed the man as the ketch was tied up, to which Burton was duly bound to correct.

“I have not been knighted as of yet, my scion of Galloway. Thank you, though, for the approbation. Since the air seems noxious at the least and foul at best we shall determine what might be done to remedy my lack of title through a discovery of a gold mine, or a learned dissertation on the amazing facts that Scotts somehow bloom into irritating brambles beneath the body politic in the widest variety of climes.”

The small wisp of a fellow grimaced visibly, having gotten the measure of his master in an instant as Richard motioned for him to remain seated, and sat across from him in the small narrow box cart as his bags were loaded on the trailing cart, even as two of the Italian brutes, scrambled over the side into the filthy water, yoked themselves like oxen on either side of the wooden trolley track, and hauled, propelling Richard and his snot-nosed Scottish facilitator at the speed of a waddling duck along the creaking, squeaking contraption that at least spared him the indignity of riding like a giant Red Indian papoose on the back of one of these sweating, Mediterranean oxen.

The outrageousness of the little Scott and the considered and hastily veiled hurt that had washed across his countenance at Richard's studied cruelty, now inspired Burton, who had occupied a sick bed and written of doings rather than doing for too long.

He then fixed the lip-biting Scott with his mesmerizing eyes, extended the hand that he had not proffered and apologized as convincingly as he was able to one of such a mean class and dubious national origin, “You may call me Dick, as you seem a likely man, despite the curse of your desperate national origin and your mean station, even here, on the edge of the civilized world. What is your name?”

“Hugh, Hugh Cook, Captain.”

“Yaas, a man of a once risen house of the rugged commons, I see. Hugh, I have no need for a cook, and the South Sea Islands appear already to have been charted. So let you be of service to Captain Dick, who is a niցցer to his peers and a mystery to the likes of you, and this far-famed explorer shall be certain to reward you according to the best of his abilities.”

“Captain Dick, proposes to employee Hugh Cook, he does, taking him away from this ever-fulfilling business on the waterfront?”

“No, Young Cook, I propose a partnership in which you engage in all of the toil, I assume all of the risk, you win all of the gold, and I glory in every accolade of a long-deserved recognition for the great things we are yet to achieve.”

The pock-marked Scott sat dumb as a heap of heather, as might have been expected, prompting Richard to seize the half-given hand, squeeze it firmly and clarify their relationship.

“Young Cook, you are my man in this vile den of despair, and then I, Captain Richard Burton, on leave from Her Majesty’s Service, itching for a bibi, thirsty for a drink, and hungering for adventure, shall show you how, in places as yet unseen, men achieve their everlasting dream. I promise you whatever riches we might win, putting aside my English impulse to worldly compensation, so that I might once again live—to strive vigorously in the wilder places of the world, man!”

Eyes bugging out in idiotic animation, Hugh Cook, snorted and then shook the worldly man’s hand.

Hugh spoke cheerfully now, though with a nervous edge to his voice, thankfully washed of its Scottish idioms and slang, but not of the prickly accent, “Captain Dick and Hugh Cook, then, a corps of discovery, a going concern of the geographic kind?”

“Yaas, yaas indeed, Young Cook, you now find yourself in partnership with the founder and representing agent, of the Royal Geographic Society!”

The wheels slowed and stopped and both men climbed down the short stair to either side to the sodden planks below, while the brutes unharnessed to retrieve his bags, soaked to the waist with filth.