The Fabulous Beast (6 page)

Atlantic Crossing

All would agree that history would have followed a different course if an unknown Galilean had not learned the art of walking on water. Not only did this remarkable man teach himself this now common skill, he was willing to pass it on to others. Just as the first firemaker handed the secret of the flame to his neighbour, thus did this early philosopher generously reveal the secret of
his
discovery to some fishermen on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. His name has been lost to us, but his talent is now universal. There are few of our children beyond the age of six or seven years who cannot now tread the waves.

At the time my stylus touches this paper we are happy to be alive and well in the year 1692 on the Carthage calendar, the anniversary of Hannibal’s victory over Rome and the rise of African dominance over what is now Italy, Greece and Spain – and later Germany and Britain. It was only some 200-odd years after this event that water-walking dispensed with the need for ships. Just 800 years ago the Angles, Saxons and Jutes marched their armies over the North Sea and wrested the fair lands of Southern Britain from Celts and remnants of the Carthaginian Legions. Following them the lightly-clad but ferocious Vikings ran the high waters to carve enclaves into our society. Then later still William and the Normans invaded, defeated Harold and the English army, but were afterwards swiftly repelled by the High King of all Ireland, Brian Bórumha mac Cennétig, whose descendants now rule all the Isles of Britain. Wounded in the thigh by Brian Boru’s blade, William Duke of Normandy was drowned on his flight back to the shores of France when he was unable to keep his footing and fell beneath the waves.

To return to the Galilean: that which suffered the most from the development of his talent was shipbuilding. Naturally there are small recreational boats, which hug the coastlines, but they are basic deckless hulls compared with the great Roman galleys, the Greek triremes and the Carthaginian warships. The craft is gone, for in more recent years ocean farms have done away even with the need for fishing vessels. We walk out to the farms to do our work, and draw the produce back on smaller rafts pulled by trained dolphins and porpoises. These creatures are only of use over short distances, being fond of play and easily bored.

All this, you know. I am coming to the point of my journal: the need to extend our explorations of the world. I am building gradually and firmly towards a record of my experiences, my personal part in a great expedition. I am proud and honoured to be here and I wish to pass on the feelings that lie within my bosom to the children of my children.

Those old days of huge armies covered in lightweight glimmering armour, crossing stretches of water like the Red Sea, the Irish Sea or even the Mediterranean in certain places – they are gone. A glorious sight it must have been, from the top of some coastal mountain, to watch men skipping across the wavelets, spearpoints flashing in the sun, wicker shields dripping with spume sprayed from ten, twenty, even fifty-thousand bare feet. They swarmed across narrow stretches of ocean, tripping the blue like dancers, intent on death and destruction. Countries exchanged hands swiftly, for none were safe, with no barriers to protect them.

More recently the world has been a settled place. Kingdoms are established, alliances in place: the world as safe as anywhere can be. All is no doubt fragile, albeit but it is a porcelain peace. My own home city of Pisa, ruled by the powerful Medici family, has seen little bloodshed in the past few years. My name, though not important, is Sforza, but I am not related to the Sforza’s of Milan. They are rich and important while my own origins are humble. I am a mere raft-puller, fortunate enough to be chosen for the expedition. However, I am not an ignorant man, being the illegitimate son of merchant who has seen fit to have me educated. The reason for my lowly employment is that it was the only way to join the endeavour, all other posts having been taken.

Our leader is a man I admire greatly for his enterprise and courage. His name is Amerigo Vespucci and he has dedicated himself to finding a new path to the East Indies, where even a humble raft-puller may become instantly wealthy. Such riches there are to be had as nutmeg and other precious spices, silks, silver, porcelain and medicinal rhubarb to cure the plague. The great armies of the Dutch, jealous of their trade routes and exclusive water-trails, prevent us from using the landways and searoads to the east, but we are going west, to forge a path to the back door.

Enterprise and courage is needed, by all on this expedition. We have thousands of miles of open ocean to cross. No one has ever attempted such a sea crossing as we are about to walk. There will be storms and tempests, and strange creatures of the deep. Unknown terrors, and perhaps, at the end, no land at all, for no one is absolutely sure that this ocean will lead to the rear of the East Indies. We hope, we pray to God and his legions of angels, to Maria-of-Nazareth his only daughter and Our Saviour, that we will not perish on the journey and will find firm footing on a land promised to us by Ptolemy, the map-maker.

All is ready. We commence the journey tomorrow morning, from the Western shores of Ireland. The sea looks calm, but for how long? I have fears. This I freely admit. We all have great hopes that the early philosopher Strabo’s calculations as to the girth of the world – in essence 18,000 miles – are correct. If it should result that Posidonius was more accurate with 24,000 miles, we shall have that much further to tread and will possibly perish through lack of fresh water and food. The arguments for Strabo are strong, but I am no mathematician and cannot gauge which of these old Greeks, if either, has the true measurement.

~

I was visited last night by ugly dreams and fearful visions of calamity, but woke this morning to a calm sea. We set forth just after dawn, drawing the rafts in the opposite direction to the rising sun, along its arrow-straight rays that glistered on the waters. There are eighteen persons to a raft, the six colourful pulling ribbons spread like a fan in front of each, with three pullers to each ribbon. I am the lead puller on the scarlet ribbon, with my good companion and cousin Giseppi behind me, and at the back there is Greta von Köln, a very strong Prussian woman. In all there are fifty rafts, with Amerigo – we almost always referred to him by his Christian name, which he preferred – and his navigators and officers of the military striding out in front, determined faces never looking back, always towards the horizon. Others: soldiers, cooks, carpenters and various artificers of a kind, walk beside and between.

This morning the Atlantic Ocean was a dull green. It appeared undulating and endless, as if it spans eternity, but my earlier fears had been chased away, replaced by the need to concentrate in order to maintain a steady, even pace on the surface. I trod with firm, deliberate and positive step. The philosophers tell us that what we do is press the water with the sole of the foot into a brief semblance of solidity. The exact science escapes me but it is the timing of the footfall, the position of the sole of the foot, the brevity of the action, all of which add up to a successful tread. The action becomes instinctive, like walking itself, and requires no thought if one has been seasoned from childhood.

Indeed, should you lose your step, sink into the liquidity of the ocean, you are lost. You cannot hope to regain the surface with your feet again. At such a moment you must pray to God you will be rescued by someone on one of the rafts and pulled to safety. Since there is only one crew on each raft while the craft is in motion, and should he or she be engaged in a more important task, your life could be forfeit.

These disasters do not happen often however. We have all been walking the waters since infancy. It is almost as natural as breathing to get things right, so long as concentration remains high. Only when one is tired of mind or physically exhausted do accidents occur. There are frequent stops to ensure our safety. On hearing the high clear note from a golden horn we drop the ribbons, execute a wide curving turn, and walk back to the raft. There we may rest, eat and drink, even sleep, while the raft floats freely on the sea. Fires are lit on the rafts to warm our blood, chilled by the ocean winds and touch of the cold grey sea which breaks over our feet.

That first morning I was greatly excited. This was a wild dream come true, for I had heard of first crossings as a child, enterprises which excited my imagination. Since hearing of them I had always wished to be part of such an exploration. The initial crossing of the Red Sea, by Moses and his followers; the primary Black Sea crossing by the Moghul Prince Natella Akaba; the first walk along the length of the Nile by the Englishman Sir Seamus Kilkenny, Earl of Cork, Wessex and the Cornish Peninsula. Those great men did not create their feats alone. They had others with them: men like me, women like Greta, who bore the brunt of the physical labour. Now I was here, on such a journey.

By noon the waves had darkened beneath my soles but more worryingly had grown bubbling stalks of cauliflower. The movement of the water was causing increasing anxiety amongst us. A swell is one thing: one can walk up hills of water and down into troughs so long as the surface is unpuckered. But a sea that is dancing with sprites is another matter. Such movement of water is dangerous and I was relieved when our leader sounded a halt. We gladly dropped the traces, Giseppi, Greta and I, and we performed our circular movements back to our raft. There we were given hard-cake and water, and were allowed to rest.

I spoke with my companions.

‘How is it with you?’ I asked Greta. ‘Can you haul at the rear with ease? Are we giving your our worth from centre and front?’

‘It would not be the extra work that would bother me, even if there any, which there is not. I can bear any labour without reproaching my fellow raft-pullers. It is the enormity of the depth of the sea beneath me,’ she replied with a worried look. ‘It bothers me, so many many fathoms.’

This has always been a concern with Greta. Her mind is a place of canyons and abysses, where lurk misshapen fears. The waters of the outer ocean plumb unknown depths. Her imagination stoops through layers of liquid darkness to the floors beneath, where she sees huge monsters and foul beings not yet revealed to humankind. In her mind she sees them rise, roaring to the surface, to swallow us whole. She describes them to us as huge slimy creatures, oleaginous, squamous, with massive staring eyes and mouths containing a forest of teeth. They have terrible faces, these beasts, and hideous bodies which taper from a bulbous head to a thread at the far end. Living as they do in the pressurised depths of the ocean, when they rise to the surface they swell to gigantic proportions.

Giseppi said, ‘I am glad I do not have the intellect to indulge in such nightmares, Greta. The sharks and whales hold enough fear for me, without inventions of the mind. To lose a foot to a dagger-toothed dogfish is to lose one’s life. Or paralysis from a box jellyfish. Or even the arms of an octopus, knitting itself around a leg. These are terrors enough.’

‘For me,’ I said, ‘it is the vastness of the space around us. It falls away on either side, to back and to front, and nothingness, nothingness in all the corners of our present world. Even the sky is empty. What I would give to see the odd wild sea bird flying from nowhere to nowhere. I would know then that we are not walking to a place where the waters of the ocean fall into a bottomless pit of blackness.’

We brooded for a moment on our own particular horrors, then spoke of brighter things.

‘When we reach the East Indies, as surely we will,’ Greta told us, ‘I am going to buy two slaves, one for the day, another for the night.’

Giseppi smiled. ‘I can be your night slave until you have purchased one,’ he said.

Greta stared at his groin. ‘I have seen what is on offer, my ribbon companion, and spaghetti comes to mind more swiftly than the image of a pikestaff.’

My male friend looked aggrieved. ‘I have had no complaints from other women,’ he stated.

‘But do they ask for a second helping?’ countered Greta.

Giseppi’s brow wrinkled and he went into deep thought. ‘No, by God, they don’t – why do you think that is?’

Greta and I almost burst with laughing. Strange it is, human social contact, for I knew that Greta was in love with Giseppi, from her body language and from her looks. He knew it too. Yet she invariably mocked Giseppi’s sexual prowess and pretended to find him wanting. It was perhaps that she was afraid of rejection and needed to protect herself.

The rest of that day became darker and more forbidding. It seemed the sky was closing down on us, pressing upon us with some weight. The air around the whole flotilla grew colder until we were huddled together around the shelters which formed the centre of the rafts. Inside our hut the domestic stock were restless and I could hear the goats bleating in distress. Waves began to wash over the rim of the raft and soak our feet.

That night there was fire in the sky, but at a great distance. It lit the Heavens every few seconds with a blanket of light. No thunder was heard, so if it was a storm it was too far off to concern us. A tempest was of course to be dreaded. There were stories of rafts being washed clear of men, women and livestock. None could walk in such conditions, so if we found ourselves in the sea during a storm we drowned. There were safety ropes to cling to, to hook one’s feet into, but waves are mighty beasts when unleashed with fury, and they will rip you from your anchor.

The unsettled weather lasted for two days, but if it did not grow better, it grew no worse. It was simply miserable. Everyone remained wet and cold, despite wearing leather smocks. Even our leaders looked despondent and yet we were hardly out of sight of land.

It will be a poor showing if we go no further than our present position. At least this long halt gives me time to catch up on my journal. This small leather-bound notebook I have is getting damper by the day but the charcoal sticks I brought with me serve better than pen and ink, the latter which would run like black rivers down the page.