God Carlos (4 page)

Long experience had taught Carlos that if he remained quiet and kept his own counsel, eventually the voyage ahead and the ensuing days of uncertainty and tedium would gradually seem natural. So he kept to himself and did not speak unless someone spoke to him first or unless it was absolutely necessary. For the first days, when he was off duty, he sat by himself on deck near the bow where he could idly watch the occasional dolphins that swam playfully alongside.

Shortly after the ship cleared Cádiz and hit the open sea, de la Serena set the watch schedule. He divided the watch into four-hour shifts, rotating them among the various seamen so that no one would be stuck permanently with the dog watch—from midnight to four a.m.

Like most mariners of his day, de la Serena was navigating by dead reckoning, which required keeping track of time. A sailor was therefore named on every watch to promptly turn over the ampoletta—the sand clock—when the sand ran out every half an hour. Knowing how many hours ago he had departed port, and estimating the speed of his ship, allowed a master a fairly accurate estimate of his latitude. Determining longitude, however, required a good chronometer that would not be invented until 1735 by John Harrison, an English carpenter.

Living in a speck of time over a hundred years earlier than Harrison, Carlos was not concerned with the ship's position, but was focused, instead, on making the adjustment to being again at sea. The ship under his feet seemed sturdy and solid. He was being fed one meal daily prepared by a cook in the open fire box in the bow of the ship. Although he lay each night on the hard deck, hugging himself for warmth, he slept soundly, waking only once to relieve himself over the side. With no bathroom aboard, the
Santa Inez
, particularly in the mornings, dragged behind her long, stringy trails of waterlogged excrement like the tentacles of an enormous jellyfish.

 

* * *

 

It would take some eight days to raise the Canary Islands. By then Carlos had gone through his transition and settled into his maritime self. He became friendlier and exchanged casual chats with other crewmen. De la Serena asked him if he would take his turn at the helm, which was flattering to his seamanship, and Carlos reluctantly agreed.

He did not like to man the helm, for the tiller that controlled the rudder was below deck, and the helmsman, having no view of either the sails or the sea, had to steer only by compass and the feel of the ship, which required great skill.

If the helmsman veered off course or miscalculated the roll of the ship or failed to anticipate the vessel's reaction to a particularly heavy wave, the officer on deck, who was supposed to be his eyes and ears, would yell at him and expose him to ridicule. A clumsy helmsman drew the wrath of his fellow seamen, especially if his insensitive touch on the tiller caused the vessel to yaw and spill the wind from her sails, requiring the labor of retrimming. Such incidents often led to bitter words, even open fights.

Carlos did his best to avoid fights on a ship at sea. Crewmen had a way of disappearing after bitter quarreling. It was an easy thing to do at night, bump a man overboard and send him tumbling into the dark sea. He would scream and cry for help, but with most of the ship asleep—and if the winds were favorable—no one would hear him.

Carlos thought such a death horrible beyond telling. It was so ghastly that even thinking about it made him shudder. You could stay afloat for hours, watching the ship ghost away on the horizon, oblivious to your screams. He could only imagine the heart-stopping terror of being abandoned in dark, open water.

Yet he had done exactly that to a Frenchman, who had done the same thing to Carlos's best friend and shipmate. And he felt no remorse because he had long been absolved of that sin.

It had happened on a voyage to Pátrai in the Ionian Sea. The ship, a tubby Portuguese vessel, was overloaded with wine casks with his friend Juan Morales, a boy from Oviedo, at the helm. It was impossible to hold her on a straight course, and several times she yawed badly, spilling water over her side and drenching the watch on deck. Juan was relieved from the helm, and when he appeared from the steering hole, the Frenchman ridiculed him loudly before everyone present. The boy defended himself heatedly, and harsh words were exchanged. Several days later, when the boy was on dog watch, he suddenly disappeared. No one ever saw him again.

There was such hot-blooded muttering among the Spanish crewmen that the captain, an indifferent Portuguese, had to interrogate the Frenchman, who had also been on duty that night but who passionately denied having anything to do with the boy's disappearance. Yet later, he was heard bragging among his friends about what he did and would do again to any dirty Spaniard who got in his way.

A few nights later, during a gale, Carlos surprised the Frenchman leaning carelessly against the railing of the quarterdeck. It took just a quick shove to send him flying into the sea. Only Carlos heard the one burbling cry for help the man was able to make before a wave shattered over his head and swept him under.

For the rest of that voyage, Carlos made sure that no one came near him at night, and he carried a dagger openly as a warning to any friend of the Frenchman. He also lived fearfully with the mortal sin of murder on his soul until he was able to return to Spain and buy absolution from a roaming pardoner.

On this voyage, Carlos vowed hard to get along with everyone, to offer no jest at another's expense, to avoid all arguments no matter what the topic, and to keep to himself as his own company. He would be pleasant to everyone, but share no intimacies with any of his shipmates. And when he was at the helm, he did his best to hold the ship on a steady course, so those who were on deck would not be exposed to the sea or lose their footing because of the roll of the ship. He had a steady hand and a good feel for the sea, and he would give no one reason to criticize his helmsmanship.

It was a promising beginning to this voyage, also, that he had been having many dreams since the ship sailed. He slept in stretches of four hours between watches, and he dreamed mainly of women. And when he awoke, his limbs would ache from sleeping on the hard decking, his cock would be stiff, and his cheeks would be damp with dew.

Yet the first thing he did on awakening, after his cock had gone down, was to say a prayer to St. Anthony, begging his protection against the perils of the seafarer. He believed that St. Anthony would understand that a man at sea must dream of women, and that no matter how much piety he had in his heart, there was no preventing this lust. It was the price mortal flesh had to pay for being molded into a man.

Chapter 5

Spaniards of the sixteenth century practiced an autonomic Catholicism that was as much a part of them as breathing. Carlos was a typical example—instinctively submissive to religious authority and one who would never gainsay even a lowly village priest. That he was a sinful man he freely admitted, and as soon as the piquancy of fresh sin had waned, he quickly went to confession and did penance to atone for his wrongdoing.

With a nearly unimaginable number of ways to commit mortal sin that could damn a soul for eternity, the sixteenth-century Catholic would have been utterly miserable but for the important ritual of confession. According to church doctrine, sin occurred not only in deed, but also in thought. Making love to a woman out of wedlock was the sin of fornication; merely dreaming about doing it was the sin of lust. Since most people cannot control their thoughts or their dreams, virtually every Catholic of sixteenth-century Spain must have felt the day-to-day prick of mortal sin and possible damnation.

But if the definition of sin was so broad as to be inescapable, the remedy was just as easily available. A Catholic of the sixteenth century was taught by the church that satisfying a particular set of rituals always yielded a predictable result. Going to confession cleansed the soul of sin. Reciting a certain prayer guaranteed the release of a loved one's soul from the tormenting fires of Purgatory. Saying a certain sequence of prayers to the Virgin Mary made her intercede on your behalf with Jesus, her only begotten son. The faithful who obeyed Catholic doctrine and practiced the rituals of Mother Church fully expected to be saved.

 

* * *

 

As the
Santa Inez
rode the northeast trades and put the Canary island of La Gomera astern, virtually every sailor aboard her was confident that if he didn't reach the New World, he would at least get to heaven.

With the religious beliefs of her crew so homogenous, it was inconceivable that the
Santa Inez
would not include some Catholic liturgy in her running. Like many ships of her time, she began and ended every day with a prayer.

Led by de la Serena, two traditional praying intervals were observed—the
tierce
between eight and nine a.m., and the
compline
between six and nine p.m.—during which the crew recited the Paternoster and the Ave Maria. On many ships, prayers were said every half an hour, but de la Serena was not that devout. Twice a day was enough for his ship. The only other prayers he led were those suggested by circumstances. So, if the seas were rough, he would pray for calm. If it was a windless day, he would pray for breeze. If a seaman was ill, he would pray for him to recover. If a pump went bad, he would pray for it to be fixed.

Most of these prayers were directed to God the Father, but some were meant for God the Son, some for God the Holy Ghost and others for the Virgin Mary. From long acquaintance, this odd pantheon, which an unbeliever might have found bizarre, made perfect sense to the men, many of whom, feeling vulnerable in a small vessel on an endless sea, found the recital of a daily liturgy to one God subdivided into three personas oddly comforting.

 

* * *

 

The
Santa Inez
would be at sea anywhere between twenty-eight and thirty-six days—depending on the winds—and cover a distance of some three thousand miles. The sailors themselves thought the journey much shorter, for it was the prevailing belief among mariners of the times that the circumference of the earth was 25 percent smaller that it actually was, a mistake caused by miscalculation of the length of a degree.

Columbus believed that a degree of longitude was forty-five nautical miles long instead of the true distance of sixty. Centuries ago, before the coming of Christ, the Greek mathematician Eratosthenes, with amazing accuracy, had estimated a degree to be 59.5 nautical miles.

But as they set out on their voyages of exploration, navigators of the fifteenth century deliberately used the smaller estimate because it made their voyages look shorter and therefore less risky. Columbus, for example, calculated the distance between the Canary Islands and Japan to be 2,400 nautical miles. In fact, it was over four times that length. But a seafarer seeking funding for an exploratory trip to Japan—or Cipangu, as Japan was then known—found it easier to raise money if Japan was closer.

 

* * *

 

The ship had settled into her rhythm, the watches changing smoothly, the daily upkeep required aboard a sailing vessel being performed so well that the actions of the crew seemed rehearsed. During every watch, the crew was responsible for keeping the decks clean, swabbing them down with buckets of seawater, and sweeping them with besoms, which were brooms made of twigs.

A sailing vessel of that era required constant adjustments to her halyards, which held up her sails and yards, and her shrouds, which held her masts in place. Rope would stretch or become worn in spots that had to be rerigged with chafing gear. Sails had to be trimmed and braces adjusted.

Every hour on the hour the helmsman was freed from his imprisonment in the steering box, where he was confined behind four walls. At the end of every stint of steering, Carlos was always grateful for relief and would briefly retreat to his customary spot near the bow and sit there for a few minutes, reveling in the clean vistas of blue sky and open sea.

By the second week at sea, a sporadic camaraderie had sprung up among the men and some of the crew had formed friendships. Carlos exchanged pleasantries with everyone he met during the changes of the shifts or with the crewmen on his watch. But he still mainly kept to himself, although in the late evenings just before the sun went down, he would occasionally sit with the other men and listen to their discussions about the New World.

One man, a loudmouthed veteran of many voyages named Miguel de Morales, had been to the New World once before and had many stories to tell about the women. It was true, he solemnly told a ring of raptly listening men, that the women went about naked with no sense of shame or modesty and that they were exceedingly friendly with their visitors from overseas, whom they regarded as gods.

Carlos started when the man said this and asked, “As gods, you say?”

A few of the men who were unaccustomed to Carlos asking questions looked quizzically at him as if they were surprised to discover that he could speak.

“As gods,” de Morales repeated firmly. “One of their prophets was said to have foretold our coming.”

“But don't the Indian men object to their women being friendly with strangers?” a sailor asked.

De Morales chuckled. “Most of the time they don't care, and if they did care, what could they do? They're cowards, these Indian men. And they're ignorant. One of them cut himself on my sword by grabbing its blade.”

“Why did he do such a foolish thing?” another sailor wondered.

“Because he'd never seen iron before. He did not know that a sword could cut him.”

“Truly, that is ignorance,” a sailor who seldom spoke muttered.

“Six well-armed Spaniards would be more than a match for a hundred Indians,” de Morales said cockily.

It was beginning to get dark, and lights were winking on throughout the ship.

At sea, there are no gradients to nightfall. In the featureless tundra of empty waves that stretches from horizon to horizon, darkness falls with the uniformity of dew, suffusing the sea in an unvarying intensity. The men watched quietly as the night relentlessly possessed the ocean and their small ship.