To the Edge of the World (13 page)

“My mother taught me.”

“She must have been a woman of great skill and training, for she has taught you well. The supplies are yours.”

Cabin boy, musician, artist—it was much to do, but I did not mind. Someday, I thought, someday I shall be famous, and the extra work now mine will seem as nothing. I am Mateo Macías, official artist of the voyage of Magallanes.

Shortly thereafter we rounded a cape and entered a wide sound that took two days to cross. Sheer cliffs towered above the shores and the currents were treacherous. As we approached the end, it again forked. The southern fork looked not to be the passageway, for it was narrow and great mountains loomed ahead of it. We instead turned to the northwest fork. As we continued to round the cape, the passage stretched northwest for as far as the eye could see.

Magallanes’s face sparkled with excitement. “Take the
Concepción
and go back to the rendezvous point to meet the
San
Antonio,
” he said to the captain of the
Concepción
once the ships came alongside. “The
Victoria
and I will continue up the strait and search for a suitable anchorage. We must reprovision before we set sail on the South Sea.”

The sights were magnificent. Heavily wooded mountains rose to dizzying heights on both sides. Rivers of snow sparkled in the sun, blinding me. Streams emptied into the passage, their banks swollen, their waters swift from the ice melt of spring. After a day’s sail, we anchored in a small bay teeming with sardines.

Immediately I left my inks, for there was much work to be done. Besides ship repairs, we snared seabirds and rabbits while netting and smoking thousands of sardines. I was glad there were no ghosts here, no whispers. Still, as I scoured out the water casks and filled them with fresh water from the stream, I could not help glancing over my shoulder. Rodrigo laughed and called me a coward, but I saw him glance, too.

When neither the
Concepción
nor the
San Antonio
returned by the twelfth day of November, Magallanes ordered us to set sail in search of the two vessels. We found the
Concepción
a short distance up the strait, but her captain said he had searched everywhere and could not find the
San Antonio
.

We searched many days for the lost ship. Since she was the largest vessel of the fleet, and therefore considered the most sea-worthy, she had been given the bulk of the provisions.

Despite our search, we found nothing.

The
San Antonio
was gone.

It was a terrible loss.

We had no choice but to continue up the passage, past the Bay of Sardines, finally arriving at the western mouth of the strait, where the open waters stretched before us.

At daybreak on the twenty-eighth day of November, we stood out to sea. The first two hours were difficult, for it was the point where the sea met the outgoing tide and the waters whipped themselves into a frenzy. It took all of the captain-general’s skill to lead us where the waters were as calm as the day we left Spain.

The midday sun hailed us through the clouds as all ships’ companies knelt in prayer. Dressed in dazzling vestments, standing high on the flagship’s poop, the padre raised a brass crucifix to the heavens and called upon the grace of Our Lady of Victory. As he led us in a hymn, tears streamed down my face. I could not help it.

The cannon blew a broadside. Seabirds scattered from the yards in a flurry of feathers and shrieks. Standing beside the flag of Castile—beside the lions, the castles—Magallanes cried, “We are about to enter waters where no ship has sailed before. May this sea be always as calm as it is today! In this hope I name it the
Mar
Pacifico
!”

XVII

November 28, 1520-January 9, 1521

As the fleet pointed north for warmer waters, we lounged in the shadow of the fo’c’sle. Cabin boys and marines, seamen and barbers. Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, and French, deciding among ourselves the value of the spices we would soon receive and how to best spend our riches.

“For myself, I shall want a bag of pepper.”

“A bag! You do not know how to dream. I shall want ten bags! A hundred!”

“Neither of you will remember pepper once you have tasted nutmeg. I tasted it once in Seville, and let me tell you, nutmeg is the finest spice you will ever smell or eat.”

“Ah, but I hear nutmeg cannot preserve meat like pepper.”

“Idiots, all of you. I care not what spices taste good or smell divine. Only a fool eats his spices. For me, I shall sell mine. It is the only wise thing to do. I have heard that in the Spice Islands one can purchase a ducat’s worth of cloves and sell it in Seville for one hundred ducats.”

“We shall all be rich!”

“With my money, I shall buy my wife a house in the city.”

“My wife shall have a new dress. No, ten new dresses. And gold earrings so heavy she must rest them on her shoulders. And a pearl necklace. She will look like nobility.”

“Pah! To spend money on a woman is foolishness. I will spend my money on me, and if my wife does not like it, she can sail to the Spice Islands and get her own spices.”

“I do not have a wife.”

“You are lucky. Wives suck the money from a man’s pocket until he is destitute and dishonored.”

“I have a good wife. She does not spend money. She cooks and cleans and has borne me a son every year for five years.”

“You, too, are lucky.”

“Yes. Lucky. Juana was with child when I left. If all went well, I have a new son. Perhaps he is one year old today.”

One pleasant December day, Magallanes ordered the fleet to turn to the northwest. Dolphins swam alongside the bow, jumping and playing, as light and happy as our mood. We knew the Spice Islands were just beyond the horizon.

Magallanes spent his days pacing the quarterdeck, afterward pouring over the many charts inside his cabin. “Ah, Mateo,” he would say as I entered to begin my watch. “Come, see our destiny.” With a short finger he stabbed at a squiggle or a blotch upon his nautical charts. I would nod, knowing such things meant continents, or seas, or islands. To me, the charts were meticulous and stunning. Sometimes, when he wasn’t looking, I brushed my fingers over the paper, thinking, I am here. Sailing upon a chart.

Then as the stars became visible each twilight, he bade me fetch his nautical instruments, saying, “Follow me.” From his cabin and onto the deck I stepped, following the commander, both my arms and my head bursting with importance. He peered at the stars with his instruments, making notations aloud. Any day, I knew, he would pronounce the Spice Islands to be just over the horizon. Perhaps I would be the first to tell my shipmates.
Prepare your sea chests for gold
and spices, rubies and silks,
I would say,
for tomorrow we arrive at the Spice
Islands. The captain-general has said so.

Instead of gold and spices, rubies and silks, Magallanes ordered all the cabin boys to boil tar in the cauldrons and coat the rigging, the bulwarks, the lines, and every seam we could see. There are many seams in a ship. We groaned, complaining. It was toilsome work, filled with stink, and hot as hell itself. After four days of drudgery, the
Trinidad
was as black as the day she left Spain. We stowed the cauldrons and sat about, aching, our skin blackened and sticky, dreaming about the day when we could trade our tar brushes for gold.

But the days grew long. Still we searched the western horizon for land. The seabirds that had cluttered our ship abandoned us and flew back to the continent. The dolphins left as well. Now the sea seemed empty. Nothing but sky and sea.

As the decks warmed, becoming a furnace, we grew listless. All chores, all yarns, all singing, all dreams of the future, melted to nothing. I played my guitar, but then my hands would cease their strumming. My voice would trail into vapor and I would find myself staring at the vast sea. Staring . . . thinking nothing . . .

Then the giant native from Port San Julián became ill. He was our only native, for the other had been aboard the
San Antonio
. We had been so certain the giant would survive the journey, for he was stronger than any of us. He laughed as he bent the shafts of our harquebuses while eating enough to feed a horse. But warmer weather made him ill. We baptized him and showed him the cross. He kissed it many times, dying with it pressed to his lips. Now a horde of sharks followed. Their triangular fins sliced through our wake.

One evening when the
Victoria
swung by for her nightly salute, we learned there was a sickness aboard their ship, a sickness that swelled the gums and left fetid breath. On that day one of their men died of this unknown plague. I watched as they cast his body overboard, turning away when the water churned with sudden violence. Perhaps this is it, I thought. Perhaps after all this time, it has found me. I burned the farm to destroy it. I fled Ávila to escape its deadly poisons, yet the pestilence chased me to the very edge of the world.

With the disappearance of the
San Antonio,
we had lost much of our provisions. Rations had been cut in half a week before, and I suffered from hunger. My throat dried and my tongue thickened with thirst. In spite of the captain-general’s impressive nautical charts and instruments, I began to wonder if we had passed the last land known to man and sailed instead toward the edge of the earth, where the water dropped off into emptiness. Rodrigo laughed at me, telling me such fancies were old tales, that all knew the earth was round and that if we kept sailing we would someday arrive back in Spain. Yet even he stopped laughing as the days passed and the sea stretched on. Staring . . . thinking nothing . . .

Magallanes’s mood became somber. Now when I entered his cabin, he did not seem to know I was there. He hunched over his maps, his forehead creased. When I set food before him and returned an hour later, it was untouched.

Each day, the sun blazed—an enemy, unbearable. My lips blistered and my skin peeled. So hot. So thirsty. Each night the stars appeared numberless, and I saw five brilliant stars in the western sky arranged like a cross. Perhaps God has not abandoned me, I thought.

On one cloudless day, another body slipped from the
Victoria
into the sea. It was Segrado. The water boiled, bubbling with red. I saw his arm here, his leg there, the silvery flash of sharks as they broke the surface of the water, jerking back and forth, fighting over his torso. Then it was over. I crumpled to the deck, sickened, my face in my hands.

The meat turned putrid and glowed in the dark. Fat white maggots writhed in it. The maggots ate not only meat, but leather, ships’ timbers, even our woolen clothing. At first I squished them, hating their blind, wriggling bodies, but then as my hunger increased, I ate them. We all did. We had no choice. I turned from Rodrigo so he would not see me gag.

The wine barrels stood empty. Now we had only water to drink, yet even the water became vile. Yellow. Swimming with vermin. It smelled so bad we plugged our noses for our daily cup.

“It is piss,” whispered Rodrigo one day as we lined up for our ration.

“Piss?”

“Why do you think it is nasty and yellow? It is because someone drank all the water and then pissed in the barrels.”

“Who?”

“How should I know? I only wish I had thought of it first.”

Toward the end of December, Rodrigo became a hunter of rats. Thin, with ash-gray shadows around his eyes, he would disappear into the hold like a fox down a hole and not return until he held a rat by the tail.

I went with him once. I crouched beside him, surrounded by darkness, the buzz of flies, the stench and heat so thick I could scarce breathe. We waited for what seemed hours. Then, suddenly, Rodrigo hurled a chunk of iron into the darkness. “Got him!” he shrieked. A moment later, he proudly held the carcass before my eyes. “A pregnant female. Worth even more, for she is extra tender and tasty.”

Many of us turned away from the rats, refusing to eat them. We hated them as much as we hated the cockroaches that erupted out of the bilges each night, scurrying over us while we slept.

To begin with, Rodrigo did not make much money, and a rat sold for only a few pennies. But as the food supply dwindled, we became insane, cursing and fighting to be the highest bidder. One rat sold for a golden ducat. At first we skinned them, eating only their soft pink flesh, hating the way they stuck in our throats with nothing but piss to wash them down. Soon we became like savages, eating the rats fur, bones, and all. At the start of his rat trade, Rodrigo would give me a portion of the rat—a leg, the tail—for free. But as the rats became more valuable and our hunger increased until we lived with constant pain, he ceased to give me rats. For many days I despised him.

Then one day Rodrigo disappeared into the hold and did not return.

XVIII

January 9-March 6, 1521

I opened my swollen mouth and hollered into the darkness.

Nothing.

I sucked in clean air, held my breath, and descended into the hold, a lantern in my hand. Rodrigo had been beaten. He lay between casks of cargo, his face a mass of bruises, his eyes swollen shut. Blood seeped from his mouth.

“Rodrigo!” I cried. I set the lantern down and knelt beside him, raising his head into my arms. It no longer mattered that I despised him. He was my best friend.

He opened his mouth, his gums crimson and swollen. “I didn’t even see him, Mateo. He came from nowhere.”

I heaved him over my shoulder and carried him from the hold. I laid him on his bedding, wiping his bruised eyes with a rag moistened with salt water. Hours later I dreamed of Rodrigo’s crazed eyes. I dreamed of the veins in his throat, bulging as he struggled to breathe, of a rat half thrust down his mouth. I dreamed that the tiny feet scrabbled against his chin, the tail whipping his cheeks. Nightmares. Always nightmares.

From that day forward, Rodrigo was out of business. Bigger, stronger men now roamed the hold, slugging senseless anyone who dared to enter.

The supply of biscuit rapidly dwindled. If it could be called biscuit, for it was yellow, filled with rat piss, crumbling into a powder that heaved with worms and weevil. We had not even shark flesh to fill our bellies. Come the New Year, they had ceased to swarm about our ships.

We hated what we saw. We looked at one another and saw only hunger. We were humans turned animals. And we looked away, for each of us knew he gazed at his own reflection. No longer did we lower the sails by night for we were too weak. It mattered not. Day after day the wind did not change and blew steady from our quarter, and though there was nothing but the endless sea, we made good speed.

One day we lay on the deck, mouths slack, watching as Magallanes tossed some charts into the sea. He screamed and tore his clothing. “With the pardon of the mapmakers, the Spice Islands are not to be found at their appointed place!” I blankly realized that his clothes hung upon his starved frame like a tent on a pole. I realized that for many days he had not called for me to sing to him. That for many days I had not set foot in his cabin.

I had forgotten. Hunger had dulled everything.

That evening, I stumbled into the captain-general’s cabin. It was moist as a jungle. Enrique lay curled in a corner like a dog asleep, stinking in a puddle of his own filth. The room was a shambles. Maps, charts, books, parchments, writing supplies, and nautical instruments lay scattered between boots and dirtied clothing.

Magallanes lay on his bed, his beard wild and untrimmed, his eyes closed in hollow, sunken sockets. At first I thought he was dead, and it reminded me of something so long ago, of someone I loved. An ache filled my heart.

I began to clean. I propped a sword in a corner and cleared the table. I tossed garbage overboard. I ate the crumbs. I rolled charts and folded clothes that reeked of sweat. Suddenly, I saw a movement out of the corner of my eye. I stopped folding clothes, staring. On the wall hung a mirror. I blinked, confused. From deep within the mirror, a desperate stranger stared back. Distorted. Horrifying. Running his tongue over cracked lips.

God, no.

Slowly, bones creaking, I covered the mirror with a shirt, thankful when the stranger vanished. I wished the dizziness behind my eyes would go away as well. I wished the raspy, persistent voice hammering in my head would shut up and leave me alone.

God has abandoned me,
it said again and again.
God has abandoned me. Do you hear, Mateo? God has abandoned me. We are lost. All
of us, lost.
And the voice wept.

The food was gone.

We stripped the leather from the yardarms and soaked it in seawater to soften it. This we ate with a gruel made from sawdust.

“This is tasty,” said Rodrigo, chewing.

I said nothing, forcing myself to swallow.

“Are you going to draw this in your sketchbook, Mateo? Us sitting and eating leather and sawdust soup?”

“Maybe I will.”

“Maybe I will eat your sketchbook.”

“Maybe I will stab you with my quill.”

“What will we eat next, do you think? How about some rigging? How about some nails?” Rodrigo snorted. “Do you know, Mateo, this would be funny were I not so hungry. I heard of a man who was so hungry he chopped off his legs and ate them. And then his fingers. But once his fingers were gone, he couldn’t chop off his arms because he couldn’t hold his knife anymore. He did everything in the wrong order, you see, so then he had to gnaw—”

“Stop it, Rodrigo. You solve nothing with such talk.”

He stared at me, his eyes crazy again. Did I look the same? My hair stinking and matted, my face whiskered and filthy, my gums swollen, my teeth rotten and loose, flies crawling in and out of every crevice. I turned away.

Rodrigo talked to the back of my head. “Don’t you see, Mateo? This is the end. Magallanes has killed us all. Even himself.”

I clamped my hands over my ears.

Day after blistering day.

Hell.

We crowded into the shade, panting, groaning with every move. Some men were mere bones, thumping the deck whenever they rolled over, a hollow clacking, sticks upon a drum. Others swelled like pregnant sows, bloated, crying with pain. All of us were surrounded by putrefying stink.

We waited.

To see who would be next.

Swellings covered my body. Colorful swellings—red, blue, yellow, green—each the size of a nut. Sometimes the swellings opened, oozing with juices. Miserable, I begged my mother to pray for me. To take the pain away. Pretending she pressed a damp cloth to my face. . . .

“O my Jesus,” I hear her pray, “forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell and lead all souls to heaven, especially those who are in most need of Thy mercy.” Then her voice softens and tears fill her eyes. “
Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in
mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta Maria, Mater
Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.”

Again and again she says this prayer. . . .

I never knew she could speak Latin.

One night someone stumbled against me.

I gasped with pain, opening my eyes. A shape loomed over me in the darkness. It is Death, I thought dully. Death has come to fetch me.

Death grabbed me and yanked me to my feet. My every joint screamed with agony. “I have done it,” it breathed. The stench of rottenness wafted over me. “Come, Mateo. Come.” It pulled me through the darkness into a cabin. A single lantern burned upon a table next to a map and an astrolabe made of brass.

“I have done it,” it said again. It pointed to the map. “There is an island out there. I saw it. It is big, and there is food and water.” Death looked at me then. Crazed. Shrunken.

Magallanes . . .

“An island?” My voice like sand, dry, grainy. I approached the map slowly. It was drawn on creamy paper, crinkled with use. Rivers of blue snaked through the land. Letters of gilded gold. Names of cities.

Seville. Málaga.

It was a map of Spain.

He pointed to Castile. “We will arrive tomorrow,” he was saying, his voice high-pitched and feverish. “You must tell the crew. Tell them we’ve arrived and to prepare.” He knelt and raised his face toward the ceiling. “O God Almighty, You have answered the prayers of the weak. O Father, Thou art merciful!”

I crawled back to my sleeping place.

That night I dreamed of an island. Lush, brimming with food and water.

In the morning, my dream came true.