1492 - Mary Johnston (best novels to read in english txt) 📗

too changeless of tune. At last, all would have had variety spring. There began a veritable hunger for some change, and it was possible to feel a faint horror. What if this is the horror—to go on forever and ever like this?

Then one morning when the sun rose, it lit a novel thing. Seaweed or grass or herbage of some sort was afloat about us. Far as the eye might reach it was like a drowned meadow, vari-colored, awash. All that day we watched it. It came toward us from the west; we ran through it from the east. Now it thinned away; now it thickened until it seemed that the sea was strewn with rushes like a castle floor. With oars we caught and brought into ship wreaths of it. All night we sailed in this strange plain. A yellow dawn showed it still on either side the Santa Maria, and thicker, with fewer blue sea straits and passes than on yesterday. The Pinta and the Nina stood out with a strange, enchanted look, as ships crossing a plain more vast than the plain of Andalusia. Still that floating weed thickened. The crowned woman at our prow pushed swathes of it to either side. Our mariners hung over rail, talking, talking. “What is it—and where will it end? Mayhap presently we can not plough it!”

I was again and again to admire how for forty years he had stored sea-knowledge. It was not only what those gray eyes had seen, or those rather large, well molded ears had heard, or that powerful and nervous hand had touched. But he knew how to take, right and left, knowledge that others gathered, as he knew that others took and would take what he gathered. He knew that knowledge flows. Now he stood and told that no less a man than Aristotle had recorded such a happening as this. Certain ships of Gades—that is our Cadiz—driven by a great wind far into River-Ocean, met these weeds or others like them, distant parents of these. They were like floating islands forever changing shape, and those old ships sailed among them for a while. They thought they must have broken from sea floor and risen to surface, and currents brought other masses from land. Tunny fish were caught among them.

And that very moment, as the endless possibilities of things would have it, one, leaning on the rail, cried out that there were tunnies. We all looked and saw them in a clear canal between two floating masses. It brought the Admiral credence. “Look you all!” he said, “how most things have been seen before!”

“But Father Aristotle’s ship—Was he `Saint’ or `Father’?”

“He was a heathen—he believed in Mahound.”

“No, he lived before Mahound. He was a wise man—”

“But his ships turned back to Cadiz. They were afraid of this stuff—that’s the point!”

“They turned back,” said the Admiral. “And the splendor and the gold were kept for us.”

A thicker carpet of the stuff brushed ship side. One of the boys cried, “Ho, there is a crab!” It sat indeed on a criss-cross of broken reeds, and it seemed to stare at us solemnly. “Do not all see that it came from land, and land to the west?”

“But it is caught here! What if we are caught here too? These weeds may stem us—turn great crab pincers and hold us till we rot!”

“If—and if—and if” cried the Admiral. “For Christ, His sake, laugh at yourselves!”

On, on, we went before that warm and potent wind, so steadfast that there must be controlling it some natural law. Ocean-Sea spread around, with that weed like a marsh at springtide. Then, suddenly, just as the murmuring faction was murmuring again, we cleared all that. Open sea, blue running ocean, endlessly endless!

The too-steady sunshine vanished. There broke a cloudy dawn followed by light rain. It ceased and the sky cleared. But in the north held a mist and a kind of semblance of far-off mountains. Startled, a man cried “Land!” but the next moment showed that it was cloud. Yet all day the mist hung in this quarter. The Pinta approached and signaled, and presently over to us put her boat, in it Martin Pinzon. The Admiral met him as he came up over side and would have taken him into great cabin. But, no! Martin Pinzon always spoke out, before everybody! “Senor, there is land yonder, under the north! Should not we change course and see what is there?”

“It is cloud,” answered the Admiral. “Though I do not deny that such a haze may be crying, `Land behind!’ “

“Let us sail then north, and see!”

But the Admiral shook his head. “No, Captain! West —west—arrow straight!”

Pinzon appeared about to say, “You are very wrong, and we should see what’s behind that arras!” But he checked himself, standing before Admiral and Don and Viceroy, and all those listening faces around. “I still think,” he began.

The other took him up, but kept considerate, almost deferring manner. “Yes, if we had time or ships to spare! But now it is, do not stray from the path. Sail straight west!”

“We are five hundred leagues from Palos.”

“Less than that, by our reckoning. The further from Palos, the nearer India!”

“We may be passing by our salvation!”

“Our salvation lies in going as we set forth to go.” He made his gesture of dismissal of that, and asked after the health of the Pinta. The health held, but the stores were growing low. Biscuit enough, but bacon almost out, and not so many measures of beans left. Oil, too, approached bottom of jars. The Nina was in the same case.

“Food and water will last,” said the Admiral. “We have not come so far without safely going farther.”

Martin Alonso Pinzon was the younger man and but captain of the Pinta_, while the other stood Don and Admiral, appointed by Majesty, responsible only to the Crown. But he had been Master Christopherus the dreamer, who was shabbily dressed, owed money, almost begged. He owed large money now to Martin Pinzon. But for the Pinzons, he could hardly have sailed. He should listen now, take good advice, that was clearly what the captain of the _Pinta thought! Undoubtedly Master Christopherus dreamed true to a certain point, but after that was not so followable! As for Cristoforo Colombo, Italian shipmaster, he had, it was true, old sea wisdom. But Martin Pinzon thought Martin Pinzon was as good there!—Captain Martin Alonso said good-by with some haughtiness and went stiffly back over blue sea to the Pinta.

The sun descended, the sea grew violet, all we on the Santa Maria gathered for vesper prayer and song. Fray Ignatio’s robe and back-thrown cowl burned brown against the sea and the sail. One last broad gold shaft lighted the tall Admiral, his thick white hair, his eagle nose, his strong mouth. Diego de Arana was big, alert and soldierly; Roderigo Sanchez had the look of alcalde through half a lifetime. I had seen Roderigo de Escobedo’s like in dark streets in France and Italy and Castile, and Pedro Gutierrez wherever was a court. Juan de la Cosa, the master, stood a keen man, thin as a string. Out of the crowd of mariners I pick Sancho and Beltran the cook, Ruiz the pilot, William the Irishman and Arthur the Englishman, and two or three others. And Luis Torres. The latter was a thinker, and a Jew in blood. He carried it in his face, considerably more markedly than I carried my grandmother Judith. But his family had been Christian for a hundred years. Before I left forecastle for poop I had discovered that he was learned. Why he had turned sailor I did not then know, but afterwards found that it was for disappointed love. He knew Arabic and Hebrew, Aristotle and Averroes, and he had a dry curiosity and zest for life that made for him the wonder of this voyage far outweigh the danger.

There was a hymn that Fray Ignatio taught us and that we sang at times, beside the Latin chant. He said that a brother of his convent had written it and set it to music.

Thou that art above us, Around us, beneath us, Thou who art within us, Save us on this sea! Out of danger, Teach us how we may Serve thee acceptably! Teach us how we may Crown ourselves, crowning Thee!

 

Beltran the cook’s voice was the best, and after him Sancho, and then a sailor with a great bass, William the Irishman. Fray Ignatio sang like a good monk, and Pedro Gutierrez like a troubadour of no great weight. The Admiral sang with a powerful and what had once been a sweet voice. Currents and eddies of sweetness marked it still. All sang and it made together a great and pleasurable sound, rolling over the sea to the Pinta and the Nina, and so their singing, somewhat less in volume, came to us. All grew dusk, the ships were bat wings sailing low; out sprang the star to which the needle no longer pointed. The great star Venus hung in the west like the lantern of some ghostly air ship, very vast.

Thou that art above us, Around us, beneath us, Thou that art within us, Save us on this sea!