To the Indies (15 page)
Authors: C. S. Forester
Tags: #Inquisition, #treasure, #Caribbean, #Indian islands, #Indians, #aristocrats, #Conquistadors, #Orinoco, #Haiti, #Spain, #natives
For the four full days which the Admiral had allotted as a maximum, Rich explored this new coast in the longboat. Southward they went, and southward again, finding the land continuous. The marshy delta-formation continued for miles — more than one big river contributed to its formation. There was a fresh water lagoon where flocked countless white aigrettes, beautiful in the sunshine. There were cranes and monkeys and parrots, while each sand bank bore its two or three caimans — the sight of them always raised a laugh in the longboat, at the memory of García’s temerity in attempting to kill one with a noose and the bare steel. There were Indians in little groups everywhere, each group with a hospitable welcome, and ready to accompany them to the next group even though it was impossible to explain to them by sign language that they were seeking a westerly passage to the open sea — they were never able to make them understand this. The Spaniards’ gesticulations were met with a wooden lack of understanding which their utmost efforts could not enlighten. The Indians knew of no sea to the west, but the evidence was not convincing, seeing that it appeared unlikely that any one of them had ever been more than ten miles from his birthplace.
One little piece of useful information they acquired, however. They were eating some of the little half-tide oysters which grew on trees, and Rich, showing pearls, was able to make it clear to one of their guides that he wanted to know if these oysters produced them. The suggestion met with an emphatic negative. By signs the guide was able to indicate that pearls were found in another kind of oyster, one with a much bigger shell, for which one had to dive deep, and which was only found in certain places to the north. It was a useful confirmation of Rich’s already well-developed theory that these little oysters would be quite fully occupied in developing into pelicans without wasting further strength on producing pearls, and it agreed with what he knew vaguely of the pearl fisheries of the East. Rich wondered how extensive these new fisheries were. Certainly there were pearls in plenty to be seen in this country, but these Indians had lived here for countless generations undisturbed, and the pearls they wore might be the accumulation of centuries. With no idea of barter or trade, and wearing the things purely for ornament, it might easily be the case that they owned pearls which might represent the annual produce of the fisheries a hundred times over.
Of the Indians’ ignorance of barter, or their utter improvidence, the longboat bore ample proof. She was laden deep with gifts; every village had stripped itself bare to supply the strangers with anything they might require — bread and fruit and strange edible roots in addition to gold and pearls. The weary crews of the ships would experience a welcome change of diet on the longboat’s return, but Rich wondered a little about how the Indians were going to live until their next crops ripened. Hawk’s-bells and red caps and steel mirrors would not fill empty bellies, but the Indians seemed to have no qualms on the subject. There might be a word in their limited vocabulary for ‘tomorrow’ — although he doubted even that — but there certainly was none for ‘the future’. He felt a little pang of sympathy for them each time the longboat pushed away from the creek-side landing places.
Southward, through the lagoons and waterways, the longboat sought for the passage to a western sea. Then eastward as well as southward, as the trend of the land forced them that way. The sun roasted them, and the rain saturated them, and insects bit them. There were tiny creatures, some flat and some cylindrical, which found their way under their clothes when they were on land and sank their jaws so deeply into their skin that their heads parted company from their bodies sooner than loose their hold when the Spaniards tried to pull them off. Next day there was an itching sore where the head had been left in the wound, and each day the soreness and irritation grew worse. Wrists and faces swelled with the bites of the mosquitoes.
In the sweltering nights there were things even worse than mosquitoes to be dreaded. On the third night they slept in an abandoned Indian clearing at the water’s edge, under the crude shelter of the boat’s sails spread to protect them from the rain storms, and Rich found himself awakened at dawn by Osorio shaking his shoulder. Rich was stupid with sleep — it was not until the early morning that he had been able to lose consciousness in the heavy heat — and it was with bleared eyes that he followed the line of Osorio’s pointing forefinger. From under the shelter of the mainsail two yards away projected the naked leg and foot of one of the seamen, thrust out, Rich presumed, in search of coolness during the night. And resting on the foot was a greyish lump, which moved a little as Rich looked. There was hardly light to see, for the faint dawn could as yet barely penetrate the forest around them, and the thing was too vague to be seen clearly, but it was ugly, menacing, obscene.
Bernardo de Tarpia had shared the shelter of the mizensail with Rich and Osorio, and he, too, was awake and staring at the thing, crossing himself and breathing hard. Then the leg moved and the thing dropped off the foot to the ground with a flutter of wings; it made towards them. There was something vile about it and they all three flinched back. The wings fluttered again in the short undergrowth; it was trying to fly and yet was unable to rise, and its course brought it close to Rich. His hand was on the hilt of his sword, which he had grasped instinctively at the first alarm, and he whirled the sheathed weapon and struck at the thing, shuddering. Again and again he struck, but Tarpia had his sword out by now, and with a cry, half prayer and half blasphemy, he slashed at the thing and the flutterings ended abruptly.
It was a bat, a furry thing, brownish above and greyish below, with wide-spread leathery wings, dead with its open mouth revealing a gleam of sharp white teeth. The revolting ugliness of the face made Rich shudder again, and the spreading pool of blood in which the creature lay disclosed the work it had been at; it had gorged itself until it was unable to rise in the air. The occupants of the other tent had awakened, and were on their feet and out now; one of them was bare-legged and pale under his tan. At Rich’s order he showed his foot. A patch of skin the size of a finger nail had been shaved from off it at the root of the great toe, and a broad stream of blood still flowed from the wound, even though the seaman was ignorant of its existence until his attention was called to it. He paled still further when he learned what had happened, and during that day they waited for him to die of the poison they thought the bat had injected into the wound. But he did not die, and the flow from the wound ceased after it had soaked the cloth in which they bound it. On their return to the ships the surgeon bled him from the right elbow, as was of course necessary after a wound in the left foot; and he recovered some days later, with the help of purges. But they did not foresee his recovery at the time. During the exploration of that day Rich was thinking of the wretched man with pity, and watching him as he lay in the bottom of the boat with the oars, creaking over him.
A shallow exit from a lagoon brought them out into open water again; there lay Trinidad to the eastward, well up over the horizon, while to the westward and the southward was the land they had been exploring. There was only a narrow gap between the two — the Serpent’s Mouth. The Admiral’s Isle of Grace, as he had named the land across the Serpent’s Mouth from Trinidad, was something more than an island, then. It was a part of the big island whose innumerable river mouths they had been examining.
“That settles it, sir, I should think,” said Osorio, peering round under his hand. “If the Admiral wants to find a passage to the westward he’ll have to come back through here first. And I don’t expect he’ll want to do that — not with that current running.”
“Perhaps not,” said Rich, looking at the green slopes of Trinidad and of what he had thought of so far as the Isle of Grace. But now they had circumnavigated the whole of this sea of Paria and there were only the two exits — the Serpent’s Mouth to the south and the Dragon’s Mouths, which they had hardly examined, to the north; if the Admiral would not use the one, he would have to use the other. Yet Rich was reluctant to give up the search for another way round. He had a strange feeling that this land of Paria held the secret of the Indies. He wanted to know how far it extended, and what ocean lay beyond it. He felt a little thrill of pleasure — at which he was inclined to smile — at the thought that his foot had been the first from Europe to be set upon it. Trinidad was a mere small island, but Paria — no one knew the limits of Paria yet.
“Take the boat in again,” he said, hoarsely, and Osorio swung the tiller over and they headed in towards the flat delta once more.
There was a bigger river mouth even than usual here; Osorio tasted the water which he lifted in his hand from overside.
“Fresh,” he said, laconically — it meant that the volume of water coming down the river was considerable, if here at the edge of the sea there was no taste of salt.
But save in the matter of size this channel was like the others they had explored: mud and jungle, mosquitoes and aigrettes. Rich wondered whether he would be able to persuade the Admiral to bring the squadron back here and to push a strong expedition, equipped for weeks of exploration, up this river. He felt a sudden yearning to head such an expedition — he felt in his bones, ridiculous though he knew such an idea to be, that this river drained no mere island, but a new unguessed-at continent. A mad theory, contrary to all the ideas held by the Admiral, a dangerous, almost an heretical, theory. If only there were some means of ascertaining how far round this revolving globe they had sailed, whether it was one third the way round, as the Admiral’s theories demanded, or one eighth the way, as Rich saw would have to be the case if his own mad guesses were correct! If only some miracle would let them know, even just for once, what time of day it was at that moment in Cadiz!
Sand-glasses, turned half-hourly for a ten weeks’ voyage, could be as much as a week out in their record at the end of that time, he knew. Ingenious mechanics were constructing engines in Germany which could tell the time with an error of not more than an hour a day. If some remarkable man could devise one accurate to a second a day, and able to withstand the shocks of a sea voyage, the problem would be solved; but no such miraculous workmanship could ever be hoped for. Wilder and more chimerical ideas flowed through Rich’s brain. Supposing a string were to be laid by a ship on the bottom of the ocean from Cadiz to the Indies, so that a twitch from one end would announce the hour of noon to the other end! Supposing some vast explosion, some flash of light, could be contrived at Cadiz at noon which could be observed in the Indies! That was plain madness, said Rich to himself, terminating his meditations with a jerk. Three thousand miles of ocean sundered Spain from the Indies. It was a gap which no wild theories could bridge and no one — at least no one without the help of magical powers — would ever be able to tell at one place what was the time at another; neither the Greek philosophers nor the Fathers of the Church held out any hope of the contrary.
“Another Indian boat, sir,” announced a seaman in the bow. “See! He’s gone up that creek over there to starboard.”
They turned the longboat and headed across the river to the creek, and sharp eyes detected the canoe hiding among the trees whose feet stood in the water. The two young Indian men who were in her had no concrete fears for their personal safety, just like all the other Indians they had encountered. They had merely taken flight before the unknown, and their confidence had only to be won for them to begin to smile broadly, with white teeth showing in contrast with their pale copper skins. The technique of handling them so as to reassure them was being acquired rapidly. Jingling hawk’s-bells, bright red caps — the young men were soon enraptured by the acquisition of treasures whose very possibility had been unguessed at by them an hour ago. But they had no treasures to give in exchange: the canoe contained nothing save a few-fibre fishing lines with fishbone hooks attached.
“
Guanin
?” said Tarpia to them; as they showed no understanding; a dozen voices repeated the word in a dozen different intonations. One of them understood at last, saying the word over again. It was the initial sound which troubled these Castilians and Andalusians, noted Rich. The
gu
- pronunciation which they used did not exactly reproduce the real sound, because the latter had no place in their language. It was more like the beginning of a good many Arabic words —
Wadi
, for instance — which was reminiscent of the way in which he himself, speaking Catalan, or the Provencals speaking their native tongue, pronounced an initial
v
.
“
Guanin
?” repeated everybody eagerly.
The Indian spread his hands deprecatingly. He had no gold.
“Where can we find
guanin
?” asked Acevedo; he went through the motions of someone seeking something, steadily repeating the word meanwhile.
The Indian grinned and pointed south. It was always to some other quarter that these Indians pointed, south or north or west; they knew no mines of gold close to them.
Rich was trying to question the other Indian about the geography of the neighborhood — a heartbreaking task in dumb show, but; the Indian paid courteous attention to his strained gesticulations. He partly understood at last and replied in a long speech, pointing round about him. Twice in the rapid sentences Rich caught the name “Paria,” and he knew already that was the name of this country. He pointed to the river, and peered along it under his hand, pointed back to the sea, and then inland again, in a desperate effort to inquire about the existence of a westward passage. The Indian grasped some of his meaning. He smiled and nodded his head; he spread his arms wide, striving with all his body to convey the impression of something big — big — big. Did that mean there was a big sea beyond? wondered Rich. The other Indian joined in. He, too, pointed to the river and spread his arms.