Quicksilver

Quicksilver, the first volume of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, weaves together three interlocking narratives set primarily in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The novel moves between the lives of Daniel Waterhouse, a Puritan natural philosopher caught between science and politics; Jack Shaftoe, a London Vagabond turned swashbuckling adventurer; and Eliza, a former harem slave who becomes a spy and financial operator. Their stories unfold against the backdrop of the Scientific Revolution, religious warfare, and the emergence of modern finance.

In October 1713, the mysterious traveler Enoch Root arrives in Boston and seeks out Daniel Waterhouse at his ramshackle Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts, where Daniel, now 67 years old, labors over a mechanical computing device called a Logic Mill. Enoch carries a letter from Princess Caroline of Ansbach, whose family stands next in line for the English throne. Caroline wants Daniel to broker a reconciliation between Isaac Newton and the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz over the calculus priority dispute, a quarrel threatening to split European science into warring factions. The letter includes a pension for Daniel's wife Faith and son Godfrey, acknowledging the mortal risks of a transatlantic voyage at his age. After much resistance, Daniel boards the ship Minerva and departs for England.

The narrative reaches back decades. In 1655, Enoch visits an apothecary in Grantham, Lincolnshire, where he observes a fair-haired schoolboy of extraordinary ingenuity. When a gift the boy crafts for an older student he admires is spurned, the child attacks him with terrifying savagery. Enoch urges the apothecary to expose the boy to mathematics rather than alchemy. The boy's name is I. Newton.

Daniel's story begins when his father Drake, a mutilated Puritan agitator whose nose and ears were cut off by Archbishop Laud's Star Chamber (an English court used to suppress religious dissent), sends him to Trinity College, Cambridge. Daniel arrives at a college transformed by the Restoration of King Charles II, where his fellow students include the Duke of Monmouth, the King's illegitimate son, and Louis Anglesey, Earl of Upnor. Daniel witnesses Upnor murder a Puritan scholar one night but does nothing, establishing a pattern of moral paralysis that haunts him for decades. He finds a kindred spirit in Isaac Newton, a sizar, or servant-student. Daniel discovers Newton's extraordinary mind: his experiments with light and perception, and his revolutionary ideas about fluxions, what will later be called the calculus.

During the Plague Year of 1665, Daniel retrieves scientific instruments from across plague-ravaged London and joins the clergyman-scientist John Wilkins and the polymath Robert Hooke at a country estate, where they conduct experiments and Wilkins works on a Philosophical Language to classify all human knowledge. In September 1666, Daniel rides toward London and discovers the city ablaze. He finds Drake on the roof of his house, bellowing Scripture at the advancing flames. King Charles II arrives and lights the fuse to blow up Drake's house as a firebreak, and Drake is consumed by the explosion.

Interspersed with these historical chapters are scenes aboard the Minerva in 1713. The ship is pursued by Blackbeard Teach's pirate fleet, and Daniel learns the pirates specifically want him. After several battles, Daniel uses trigonometry to prove an approaching schooner will run aground, and the Minerva escapes into the open Atlantic.

In the 1670s, Daniel presents Newton's reflecting telescope to the Royal Society, England's leading scientific institution, and begins a career as a political operative. Leibniz arrives in London in 1673, carrying an unfinished calculating machine and proposing that cogitation and computation are the same thing. The dying Wilkins charges Daniel with an ambiguous responsibility: "to make it all happen."

The second narrative strand introduces Jack Shaftoe, who grows up as a mudlark on the Isle of Dogs with his brothers Dick and Bob. After drifting across Europe as a mercenary, Jack joins the Christian armies converging on Vienna to break the Ottoman siege in 1683. During the battle's aftermath, he follows an escaped ostrich into a mine tunnel beneath the city, where he finds Janissaries, elite Ottoman soldiers, executing women from a harem. Jack kills them and discovers Eliza, a blue-eyed, English-speaking woman originally abducted from the remote island of Qwghlm by Barbary corsairs when she was five. Trained in the harem in languages and financial skills, Eliza proposes a partnership: Jack provides armed escort and Eliza handles their money.

They journey westward through Bohemia, sell Turkish silks at the Leipzig Fair, and encounter Leibniz, who invites them to inspect silver mines in the Harz Mountains. In Amsterdam, Eliza discovers the financial markets and begins trading in V.O.C. (Dutch East India Company) derivatives, financial instruments derived from company shares. Jack rides to Paris, where he crashes the duc d'Arcachon's ball on horseback and narrowly escapes after the rising English officer John Churchill intervenes. Returning to Amsterdam, Jack invests their remaining capital in a trading voyage that proves to be a slaving expedition. When the ship is captured by Barbary corsairs off Morocco, Jack ends up chained to an oar as a galley slave.

The third strand follows Eliza's rise as a spy. The comte d'Avaux, French Ambassador to the Dutch Republic, recruits her, and William of Orange, Stadholder of the Dutch Republic, enlists her as a double agent. At Versailles, she builds a network of noble clients, writes encrypted letters to Leibniz, and devises financial schemes for Louis XIV, who ennobles her as Countess de la Zeur. In 1688, Eliza escapes France, gathering intelligence about military preparations along the way. She deliberately sleeps with Étienne d'Arcachon, the one-armed son of the duc, to create cover for her presence near the front. The true father of the child she conceives is the cryptanalyst Bonaventure Rossignol. Eliza reaches the Hague with two German princesses, Princess Eleanor of Saxe-Eisenach and her five-year-old daughter Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach, and delivers her intelligence to William, who launches his invasion of England. After French agents sabotage her delivery by redirecting her to hostile attendants, Eliza gives her newborn son to Princess Eleanor to raise, telling the world the child was stillborn.

Meanwhile, Daniel navigates England's upheavals. He earns the trust of the new Catholic king James II, helps Newton publish the Principia Mathematica, and travels across England releasing imprisoned Dissenters (Protestants outside the Church of England). During the Glorious Revolution, Daniel is imprisoned in the Tower of London by the feared judge Jeffreys but is protected by Sergeant Bob Shaftoe, Jack's brother, now serving under Churchill's command. Daniel later finds James II being beaten by fishermen in a seaside tavern after the King's failed flight and helps track Jeffreys to a Wapping tavern, where the former Lord Chancellor is arrested.

In October 1689, the diarist and administrator Samuel Pepys organizes a farewell party for Daniel at Robert Hooke's office in Bethlem Hospital, gathering luminaries of the Royal Society. Daniel, slowly dying from a bladder stone, plans to sail for Massachusetts. After Daniel falls asleep, Hooke straps him into a chair and prepares to cut the stone from his bladder. "I am Robert Hooke, than whom no man was ever better suited to perform this work," Hooke tells the terrified Daniel. "I am utterly lacking in the quality of mercy. Which is well, as it would render me perfectly incompetent to carry out this operation." The novel ends with Daniel pinned beneath Hooke's blade as the story continues in subsequent volumes of the Baroque Cycle.