1492 - Mary Johnston (best novels to read in english txt) 📗
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All laughed at that, and indeed Gutierrez could mimic to perfection. We got, full measure, the beggar’s loftiness.
“So the siren sings and the prior leaps to meet her, or tarantula stings him and be dances! `I am growing mad too,’ thinks Fray Juan Perez, and begins presently to tell that last week he dreamed of Prester John. The end is that he and the beggar talk till midnight and the next morning they talk again, and the prior sends for his friends Captain Martin Alonzo Pinzon and the physician Garcia Fernandez. The beggar gains them all!”
“Do you think a beggar can do that?” I said. “Only a giver can do that.”
Pedro Gutierrez turned black eyes upon Juan Lepe, whom he resented there on the poop deck. “How could you have learned so much, Doctor, while you were making sail and washing ship?” He was my younger in every way, and I answered equably, “I learned in the same way that the Admiral learned while he begged.”
“Touched!” said Diego de Arana. “So that is the way the prior came into the business?”
“He enters with such vigor,” said Gutierrez, “that what does he do but write an impassioned letter to the Queen, having long ago, for a time, been her confessor? What he tells her, God knows, but it seems that it changes the world! She answers that for herself she hath grieved for Master Columbus’s departure from the court and the realm, and that if he will turn and come to Santa Fe, his propositions shall at last be thoroughly weighed. Letter finds the beggar with his boy honored guest of La Rabida, touching heads with Martin Pinzon over maps and charts and the `Book of Travels’ of Messer Marco Polo. There is great joy! The beggar hath the prior’s own mule and his son a jennet, and here we go to Santa Fe! That was last year. Now the boy that whimpered for bread at convent gate is Don Diego Colon, page to Prince Juan, and the Viceroy sails on the Santa Maria for the countries he will administer!”
Gutierrez shook the dice in the box. “Oh, Queen Luck, that I have served for so long! Why do you not make me viceroy?”
Said Escobedo, “Viceroy of the continent of water and Admiral of seaweed and fishes!”
Diego de Arana took that up. “We are obliged to find something! No sensible man can think like some of those forward that this goes on forever and we shall sail till the wood rots and sails grow ragged and wind carries away their shreds or they fall into dust!”
“Who knows anything of River-Ocean? We may not find the western shore, if there be such a thing, for a year! By that time storm will sink us ten times over, or plague will take us—”
“There’s not needed plague nor storm. Just say, food won’t last, and water is already half gone!”
“That’s the undeniable truth,” quoth Roderigo Sanchez, and looked with a perturbed face at the too-smooth sea.
Smooth blue sea continued, wind continued, pushing like a great, warm hand, east to west. The Admiral spent hours alone in his sleeping cabin. There were men who said that he studied there a great book of magic. He had often a book in his hand, it is true, but Juan Lepe the physician knew what he strove to keep from others, that the gout that at times threatened crippling was upon him and was easier to bear lying down.
Sunset, vesper prayer and Salve Regina. As the strains died, there became evident a lingering on the part of the seamen. The master spoke to the Admiral. “They’ve found out about the needle, sir! Perhaps you’d better hear them and answer them.”
Almost every day he heard them and answered them. To make his seamen, however they groaned and grumbled and plotted, yet abide him and his purpose was a day-after-day arising task! Now he said equably, in the tone almost of a father, “What is it to-day, men?”
The throng worked and put forward a spokesman, who looked from the Admiral to the clear north. “It is the star, sir! The needle no longer points to it! We thought you might explain to us unlearned—What we think is that distance is going to widen and widen! What’s to keep needle from swinging right south? Then will we never get home to Palos and our wives and children—never and never and never!”
Said the Admiral, “It will not change further, or if it does a very little further!” In his most decisive, most convincing voice he explained why the needle no longer pointed precisely to the star. The deviation marked and allowed for, it was near enough for practical purposes, and the reasons for the wandering—
I do not know if the wisdom of our descendants will confirm his explanation. It is so often to explain the explanation! But one as well as another might do here. What the Santa Maria wanted was reassurance, general and large, stretching from the Canaries to India and Cathay and back again. He knew that, and after no great time spent with compass needle and circularly traveling polar star, he began to talk gold and estate, and the pearls and silk and spices they would surely take for gifts to their family and neighbors, Palos or Huelva or Fishertown!
It was truly the hope that upheld many on a voyage that they chose to think a witches’ one. He talked now out of Marco Polo and he clad what that traveler had said in more gorgeous attire. He meant nothing false; his exalted imagination saw it so. He was painter of great pageants, heightening and remodeling, deepening and purifying colors, making humdrum and workaday over to his heart’s desire. The Venetian in his book, and other travelers in their books, had related wonders enough. These grew with him, it might be said—and indeed in his lifetime was often said—into wonders without a foot upon earth. But if one took as figures and symbols his gold roofs and platters, temples and gardens, every man a merchant in silks and spices, strange fruit-dropping trees and pearls in carcanets, the Grand Khan and Prester John—who could say that in the long, patient life of Time the Admiral was over-esteeming? The pity of it was that most here could not live in great lengths of time. They wanted riches now, now! And they wanted only one kind of riches; here and now, or at the most in another month, in the hands and laps of Pedro and Fernando and Diego.
THERE grew at times an excited feeling that he was a prophet, and that there were fabulously great things before us. As I doctored some small ill one day in the forecastle, a great fellow named Francisco from Huelva would tell me his dream of the night before. He had already told it, it seemed, to all who would listen, and now again he had considerable audience, crowding at the door. He said that he dreamed he was in Cipango. At first he thought it was heaven, but when he saw golden roofs he knew it must be Cipango, for in heaven where it never rained and there were no nights, we shouldn’t need roofs. One interrupted, “We’d need them to keep the flying angels from looking in!”
“It was Cipango,” persisted Francisco, “for the Emperor himself came and gave me a rope of pearls. There were five thousand of them, and each would buy a house or a fine horse or a suit of velvet. And the Emperor took me by the hand, and he said, `Dear Brother—’ You might have thought I was a king—and by the mass, I was a king! I felt it right away! And then he took me into a garden, and there were three beautiful women, and one of them would push me to the other, and that one to the third, and that to the first again, as though they were playing ball, and they all laughed, and I laughed. Then there came a great person with five crowns on his head, and all the light blazed up gold and blue, and somebody said, `It’s Prester John’!”
His dream kept a two-days’ serenity upon the ship. It came to the ear of the Admiral, who said, ” `In dreams will I instruct thee.’—I have had dreams far statelier than his.”
Pedro Gutierrez too began to dream,—fantastic things which he told with an idle gusto. They were of wine and gold and women, though often these were to be guessed through strange, jumbled masks and phantasies. “Those are ill dreams,” said the Admiral. “Dream straight and high!” Fray Ignatio, too, said wisely, “It is not always God who cometh in dreams!”
But the images of Gutierrez’s dreams seemed to him to be seated in Cathay and India. They bred in him belief that he was coming to happiness by that sea road that glistered before us. He and Roderigo de Escobedo began to talk with assurance of what they should find. Having small knowledge of travelers’ tales they made application to the Admiral who, nothing loth, answered them out of Marco Polo, Mandeville and Pedro de Aliaco.
But the ardor of his mind was such that he outwent his authors. Where the Venetian said “gold” the Genoese said “Much gold.” Where the one saw powerful peoples with their own customs, courts, armies, temples, ships and trade, the other gave to these an unearthly tinge of splendor. Often as he sat in cabin or on deck, or rising paced to and fro, we who listened to his account, listened to poet and enthusiast speaking of earths to come. Besides books like those of Marco Polo and John Mandeville and the Bishop of Cambrai he had studied philosophers and the ancients and Scripture and the Fathers. He spoke unwaveringly of prophecies, explicit and many, of his voyage, and the rounding out of earth by him, Christopherus Columbus. More than once or twice, in the great cabin, beneath the swinging lantern, he repeated to us such passages, his voice making great poetry of old words. “Averroes saith—Albertus Magnus saith—Aristotle saith—Seneca saith—Saint Augustine saith—Esdras in his fourth book saith—” Salt air sweeping through seemed to fall into a deep, musical beat and rhythm. “After the council at Salamanca when great churchmen cried Irreligion and even Heresy upon me, I searched all Scripture and drew testimony together. In fifty, yea, in a hundred places it is plain! King David saith —job saith—Moses saith—Thus it reads in Genesis—”
Diego de Arana smote the table with his hand. “I am yours, senor, to find for the Lord!” Fray Ignatio lifted dark eyes. “I well believe that nothing happens but what is chosen! I will tell you that in my cell at La Rabida I heard a cry, `Come over, Ignatio the Franciscan!’ “
And I, listening, thought, “Not perhaps that ancient spiritual singing of spiritual things! But in truth, yes, it is chosen. Did not the Whole of Me that I can so dimly feel set my foot upon this ship?” And going out on deck before I slept, I looked at the stars and thought that we were like the infant in the womb that knows not how nor where it is carried.
We might be four hundred leagues from Spain. Still the wind drove us, still we hardly shifted canvas, still the sky spread clear, of a vast blue depth, and the blue glass plain of the sea lay beneath. It was too smooth, the wind in our rigging
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