The Pacific was calm that spring, its infinite blue broken only by the white sails of the Boussole as Jean-François de Lapérouse's expedition neared Easter Island. France's explorers were charting the unknown edges of the world. But back in Europe, in the smoke-filled salons of London and the secret offices of Soho, another kind of exploration was unfolding — one not of oceans, but of human greed, weakness, and control.
The Ghost Cell had reached its most delicate stage: the locking of the markets. Every thread spun since the previous autumn — every rumor, every bribe, every forged signature — now converged on one objective: to seize the arteries of British colonial supply without a single musket fired.
In the first week of April 1786, the New South Wales Provisioning Company (NSWPC) was a name whispered across the corridors of the Admiralty and the Home Office. It was, to all appearances, a British enterprise — an energetic newcomer that promised efficiency and modernity where others offered complacency. Behind its ledgers, however, the ink was French. Its capital came from Geneva; its intermediaries were Dutch and Walloon; and its strategic mind — known to none — was a man who signed his secret letters "051."
The company's headquarters on Broad Street bustled with activity. Clerks transcribed data, messengers ran between coffeehouses, and accountants compared freight costs and biscuit prices. But the true planning happened elsewhere — in a rented office on the second floor of a Soho building, where "Mr. Delacroix" and his small circle worked under candlelight until dawn.
They were not merchants; they were engineers of illusion.
Each bid prepared by the NSWPC was a masterpiece of deception. The numbers, at first glance, appeared utterly reasonable — just competitive enough to attract attention, yet never so low as to invite suspicion. "Always make honesty your disguise," 051 had once told them. "A liar's greatest weapon is the truth, carefully placed."
Walsh, their loyal informant inside the Admiralty, had provided detailed projections: the anticipated budgets, the average prices from prior contracts, and the margins approved by the Treasury. From this, the Cell crafted bids with surgical precision. If the average market price for salted beef stood at eight shillings per hundredweight, they proposed seven and ninepence. Not outrageous — merely efficient. The kind of saving a committee could boast about in its report to Parliament.
The biscuits were priced even lower, but paired with inflated transportation costs — a clever trick. If questioned, they could claim that the long voyage to the Pacific justified the expense. To the untrained eye, every figure aligned with bureaucratic sense.
Behind the facade, however, the system was rotten. The beef would be salted with inferior brine, packed in barrels already used for Baltic herring. The biscuits were overbaked, dry as chalk, their flour bulked with powdered root. And the transport cost? A phantom entry concealing the siphoning of gold into Swiss accounts.
The delivery schedules were audacious — impossibly short for honest traders, but irresistibly attractive to decision-makers desperate for results. The NSWPC pledged to deliver full shipments to Portsmouth within eight weeks — an absurdity, given the usual twelve. Yet 051 understood the psychology of bureaucracy: the Admiralty's clerks were men obsessed with deadlines and glory. They wanted triumphs to report, not caution to display.
The contracts contained built-in flaws that would later serve as lifelines. Hidden among the legalese were clauses permitting renegotiation in case of "unexpected maritime delay," which could be interpreted as broadly as needed. Walsh had ensured their inclusion, slipping the modified drafts into the stack of official paperwork before final approval. Once signed, even the sharpest auditors would find the language impeccable.
The final stroke of genius lay in the technical specifications. Every request matched exactly the "amended" versions written by Walsh — subtle adjustments that transformed fairness into monopoly.
The Admiralty's call for "iron nails, wide-headed, suitable for ship repair and coastal construction" could only be fulfilled by the Liège forge owned by the Cell. No one noticed that the design differed slightly from the standard British pattern. Similarly, the biscuit dimensions had been altered from "eight to nine inches" to a specific "eight and a half," which corresponded only to the defective molds of their Dutch partners.
Each specification was a thread woven into a web that would bind the Empire's hands.
If deception was the Cell's art, sabotage was its science. 051 understood that winning contracts was not only a matter of offering the best terms — it was about ensuring that no rival could compete at all.
Through his network of intermediaries, 051 set loose a whisper campaign that flowed through London's mercantile circles like fog along the Thames. Anonymous letters arrived at counting houses, hinting at financial instability among the NSWPC's competitors. At Lloyd's Coffee House, where insurers gathered daily, murmurs spread that one of the leading supply firms had overextended its colonial credit in the Caribbean and risked bankruptcy.
No proof was offered — but none was needed. In the world of commerce, rumor alone could destroy. Within days, rates of insurance on that company's shipments rose, making their bids uncompetitive.
A rival provisioning firm, respected for decades, suddenly found its bank refusing to extend its line of credit. The directors, bewildered, learned that a "confidential warning" had reached the bank's board — a warning about "unreliable solvency." The source of this message was traced, indirectly, to a Geneva merchant house: Société Générale d'Approvisionnement Colonial — the same financial shell that funneled funds for 051.
When one of the competitors sought to confront the rumor, a polite letter appeared in the London Chronicle, signed by a "concerned investor," questioning the firm's ethics in prior contracts. It was a masterstroke — no direct accusation, yet enough to cast doubt. The public believed what it wished to believe, and by May, the field had thinned.
Meanwhile, Edgar Thorne — still trapped in his gilded cage of debt — had connected the Cell to an unscrupulous parliamentary lawyer, Mr. Nathaniel Hargreaves. The man was a professional manipulator of reputation. For a discreet retainer, he began whispering in the right ears: to a junior undersecretary at the Treasury, to a member of the Colonial Board, to a sympathetic journalist.
The message was consistent: the NSWPC represented modern British enterprise — a private company run by men of action, free from the corruption of the old supply system. It was exactly the kind of patriotic narrative the government longed to hear.
In the House of Commons, William Pitt the Younger had just placed the management of the national debt's sinking fund under independent commissioners — a move that signaled both reform and restraint. The administration was eager to showcase prudence and efficiency across all branches of government. The NSWPC's bids arrived at the perfect moment.
To the committee members reviewing the contracts, the company appeared to embody Pitt's vision: efficient, accountable, and undeniably British. No one thought to ask where its investors came from.