1492

CHAPTER VIII

JUAN LEPE, quitting the Vega of Granada, recrossed the mountains. I was at wander. I did not go to Malaga. I did not then go to Palos. I went to San Lucar. I had adventures, but I will not draw them here. The ocean by Palos continued with me in sight and sound and movement. But I did not go to Palos. I went to the strand of San Lucar, and there I found a small bark trading not to Genoa but to Marseilles. Seamen lacked, and the master took me gladly. I freshened knowledge upon this voyage.

The master was a dour, quiet Catalan; his three sons favored him and their six sailors more or less took the note. The sea ran quiet and blue under a quiet blue heaven. At night all the stars shone, or only light clouds went overhead. It was a restful boat and Jayme de Marchena rested. Even while his body labored he rested. The sense of Danger in every room, walking on every road, took leave. Yet was there throughout that insistent sight of Palos beach and the gray and wild Atlantic. All the birds cried from the west; the salt, stinging wind flung itself upon me from the west. Once a voice, faint and silvery, made itself heard. “Were it not well to know those other, those mightier waters, and find the strange lands, the new lands?” I answered myself, “They are the old lands taken a new way.” But still the voice said, “The new lands!”

We made Marseilles and unladed, and were held there a fortnight. I might have left the bark and found work and maybe safety in France, or I might have taken another ship for Italy. I did neither. I clung to this bark and my Cata-lans. We took our lading and quitted Marseilles, and came after a tranquil voyage to San Lucar. Again we unladed and laded, and again voyaged to Marseilles. Spring became summer; young summer, summer in prime. We left Marseilles and voyaged once more San Lucar-ward. There rushed up a fearful storm and we were wrecked off Almeria. One lad drowned. The rest of us somehow made shore. A boat took us to Algeciras, and thence we trudged it to San Lucar.

My Catalans were not wholly depressed. Behind their wrecked ship stood merchants who would furnish another bark. The master would have had me wait at San Lucar until he went forth again. But I was bound for the strand by Palos and the gray, piling Atlantic.

August was the month and the day warm. The first of August in the year 1492. Two leagues east of Palos I overtook three men trudging that way, and talking now loudly and angrily and now in a sullen, dragging fashion. I had seen between this road and ocean a fishing hamlet and I made out that they were from this place. They were men of small boats, men who fished, but who now and again were gathered in by some shipmaster, when they became sailors.

In me they saw only a poorly clad, sea-going person. When I gave greeting they greeted me in return. “For Palos?” I asked, and the one who talked the most and the loudest gave groaning assent. “Aye, for Palos. You too, brother, are flopping in the net?”

I did not understand and said as much. He gave an angry laugh and explained his figure. “Why, the Queen and the King and the law and Martin Pinzon, to whom we, are bound for a year, are pressing us! Which is to say they’ve cast a net and here we are, good fish, beating against the meshes and finding none big enough to slip through! Haven’t you been pressed too, scooped in without a ‘By your leave, Palos fish!’ A hundred fish and more in this net and one by one the giant will take us out and broil us!”

The second man spoke with a whine. “I had rather a Barbary pirate were coming aboard! I had rather be took slave and row a galley!”

The third, a young man, had a whimsical, dark, fearless face. “But we be going to see strange things and serve the Queen! That’s something!”

“The Queen is just a lady. She don’t know anything about deep and fearful seas!”

“Where are you going,” I asked, “and with whom?”

The angry man answered, “The last of that is the easiest, mate! With an Italian sorcerer who has bewitched the great! He ought to be burned, say I, with the Jews and heretics! We are going with him, and we are going with Captain Martin Pinzon, whom he hath bewitched with the rest! And we are going with three ships, the Santa Maria, the Pinta and the Nina.”

The third said, “The Santa Maria’s a good boat.”

“There isn’t any boat, good or bad,” the first answered him, “that can hold together when you come to heat that’ll melt pitch and set wood afire! There isn’t any boat, good or bad, that can stand it when a lodestone as big as Gibraltar begins to draw iron!”

The second, whose element was melancholy, sighed, “I’ve been north of Ireland, Pedro, and that was bad enough! The lookout saw a siren and the Infanta Isabella was dashed on the rocks and something laughed at us all night!”

“Ireland’s nothing at all to it!” answered the angry man, whose name was Pedro. “I’ve heard men that know talk! The Portuguese going down Africa coast got to Cape Bojador, but they’ve never truly gotten any further, though I hear them say they have! They sent a little carrack further down, and it had to come back because the water fell to boiling! There wasn’t any land and there wasn’t any true sea, but it was all melted up together in fervent heat! Like hot mud, so to speak. It’s hell, that’s what I say; it’s hell down there! Moreover, there ain’t any heaven stretched over it.”

“What does it mean by that?” asked the second.

“It means, Fernando, that there wouldn’t be any sky, blue nor gray nor black, nor clouds, nor air to breathe! There wouldn’t be any thunder and lightning nor rain nor wind, and at night there wouldn’t be stars, no north star, nor any! It would just be—I don’t know what! Fray Ignatio told me, and he said the name was ‘chaos’.”

“That was south. That wasn’t west.”

“West is just as bad!”

Fernando also addressed the young man, the third, calling him Sancho. “If there were anything west for Christian men, wouldn’t the Holy Father at Rome have sent long ago? We are all going to die!”

“But they didn’t know it was round,” said Sancho. “Now we do, and that’s the difference! If you started a little manikin just here on an orange and told him to go straight ahead, he’d come around home, wouldn’t he?”

“You weary me, Sancho!” cried the first. “And what if you did that and it took so long that you come back to Fishertown old and bald and driveling, and your wife is dead and all the neighbors! Much good you’d have from knowing it was round!”

“When you got right underfoot wouldn’t you fall; that’s what I want to know?”

“Fall! Fall where?”

“Into the sky! My God, it’s deep! And there wouldn’t be any boat to pick you up nor any floating oar to catch by—”

The vision seemed to appall them. Fernando drew back of hand across eyes.

I came in. “You wouldn’t do that any more than the ant falls off the orange! Men have come back who have been almost underfoot, so far to the east had they traveled. They found there men and kingdoms and ways not so mightily unlike ours.”

“They went that way,” answered Pedro, jerking his hand eastward, “over good land! And maybe, whatever they said, they were lying to us! I’m thinking most of the learned do that all the time!”

“Well,” said Sancho, “if we do come back, we’ll have some rare good tales to tell!”

There fell a pause at that, a pause of dissent and exasperation, but also one of caught fancy. It would undoubtedly be a glory to tell those tales to a listening, fascinated Fishertown!

Juan Lepe said, “For months I’ve been with a trader running from San Lucar to Marseilles. I’ve had no news this long while! What’s doing at Palos?”

They were ready for an audience, any audience, and forthwith I had the story of the Admiral fairly straight—or I could make it straight—from that day when we parted on the Cordova road. These men did not know what had happened in March or in April, but they knew something of May. In May he came to Palos and settled down with Fray Juan Perez in La Rabida, and to see him went Captain Martin Pinzon who knew him already, and the physician Garcia Fernandez and others, and they all talked together for a day and a night. After that the alcalde of Palos and others in authority had letters and warrants from the Queen and the King, and they overbore everything, calling him Don and El Almirante and saying that he must be furnished forth. Then came a day when everybody was gathered in the square before the church of Saint George, and the alcalde that had a great voice read the letters.

“I was there!” said Fernando. “I brought in fish that morning.”

“I, too!” quoth Sancho. “I had to buy sailcloth.”

It was Pedro chiefly who talked. “They were from the King and Queen, and the moral was that Palos must furnish Don Cristoval Colon, Admiral of the Ocean-Sea—and we thought that was a curious thing to be admiral of!—two ships and all seamen needed and all supplies. A third ship could be enterprised, and any in and around Palos was to be encouraged to put in fortune and help. Ships and those who went in them were to obey the said Don Cristoval Colon or Columbus as though he were the Queen and the King, the Bishop of Seville and the Marquis of Cadiz! It didn’t say it just that way but that was what it meant. We were to follow him and do as he told us, or it would be much the worse for us! We weren’t to put in at St. George la Mina on the coast of Africa, nor touch at the King of Portugal’s islands, and that was the whole of it!”

“All seamen were to be given good pay,” said Sancho. “And if anybody going was in debt, or even if he had done a crime—so that it wasn’t treason or anything the Holy Office handles—he couldn’t be troubled or held back, seeing it was royal errand. That is very convenient for some.”

Pedro lost patience. “You’d make the best of Hell itself!”

“He’d deny,” put in Fernando, “Holy Writ that says there shall be sorrows!”

They embarked upon loud blame of Sancho, instance after instance. At last I cut them across. “What further happened at Palos?”

They put back to that port. “Oh, it didn’t seem so bad that day! One and another thought, ‘Perhaps I’ll go!’ Him they call The Admiral is a big figure of a man, and of course we that use the sea get to know how a good captain looks. We knew that he had sailed and sailed, and had had his own ship, maybe two or three of them! Then too the Pinzons and the Prior of La Rabida answered for him. A lot of us almost belong to the Pinzons, having signed to fish and voyage for them, and the Prior is a well-liked man. The alcalde folds up the letter as though he were in church, and they all come down the steps and go away to the alcalde’s house which is around the corner. It wasn’t until they were gone that Palos began to ask, ‘Where were three ships and maybe a hundred and fifty men going?’”

“We found out next day,” said Fernando. “The tide went out, but it came back bearing the sound of where we were going!”

“Then what happened in Palos?”

“What happened was that they couldn’t get the ships and they couldn’t get the men! Palos wouldn’t listen. It was too wild, what they wanted to do! It wouldn’t listen to the Prior and it wouldn’t listen to Doctor Garcia Fernandez, and it wouldn’t even listen to Captain Martin Alonso Pinzon. And when that happens—! So for a long time there was a kind of angry calm. And then, lo you! we find that they have written to the Queen and the King. There come letters to Palos, and they are harsh ones!”

“I never heard harsher from any King and Queen!” said Fernando.

“There weren’t only the letters, but they’d sent also a great man, Senor Juan de Penelosa, to see that they got obedience. Upshot is we’ve got to go, ships and men, or else be laid by the heels! As for Palos, her old sea privileges would be taken from her, and she couldn’t face that. Get those ships ready and stock them and pipe sailors aboard, or there’d be our kind Queen and King to deal with!”

“Wherever it is, we’re going. Great folk are too tall and broad for us!”

“So there comes another crowd in the square, before the church. Out steps Captain Martin Pinzon, and he cries, ‘Men of Palos, for all you doubt it, ‘tis a glorious thing that’s doing! Here is the Nina that my brothers and I own. She’s going with Don Cristoval the Admiral, and the men who are bound to me for fishing and voyaging are going, and more than that, there is going Martin Alonso Pinzon, for I’ll ask no man to go where I will not go!’

“Then up beside him starts his brothers Vicente and Francisco, and they say they are going too. Fray Ignatio stands on the church steps and cries that there are idolaters there, and he will go to tell them about our Lord Jesus Christ! Then the alcalde gets up and says that the Sovereigns must be obeyed, and that the Santa Maria and the Pinta shall be made ready. Then the pilots Sancho Ruiz and Pedro Nino and Bartolomeo Roldan push out together and say they’ll go, and others follow, seeing they’ll have to anyhow! So it went that day and the next and the next, until now they’ve pressed all they need. So I say, we are here, brother, flopping in the net!”

“When does he sail?”

“Day after to-morrow, ‘tis said. But we who don’t live in Palos have our orders to be there to-night. Aren’t you going too, mate?”

I answered that I hadn’t thought of it, and immediately, out of the whole, there rose and faced me, “You have thought of it all the time!”

Sancho spoke. “If you’ll go with us to Captain Martin Pinzon, he’ll enter you. He’d like to get another strong man.”

I said, “I don’t know. I’ll have to think of it. Here is Palos, and yonder the headland with La Rabida.”

We entered the town. They would have had me go with them wherever they must report themselves. But I said that I could not then, and at the mouth of their street managed to leave them. I passed through Palos and beyond its western limit came again to that house of the poorest where I had lodged six months before and waking all night had heard the Tinto flowing by like the life of a man. Long ago I had had some training in medicine, and in mind’s medicine, and three years past I had brought a young working man living then in Marchena out of illness and melancholy. His parents dwelled here in this house by the Tinto and they gave me shelter.