Following the Sun (6 page)

The previous night at the American expatriate outpost had been confusing, with many comings and goings, and too much sherry and lights and music and a loud American woman who dressed like a local and an apparent household pet, a young gypsy boy, who danced flamenco for the assembled. The presence of this hyena in the bright sun of southern Spain, the dangerous lions of the Coto, and the whole grand folly of my adventure suddenly struck me as very funny, and I had to wait outside the fence for a while to compose myself enough to present my credentials and my disguised persona of journalist. It was not necessary; the official, a small man with a pencil-thin moustache, was ever so cavalier, and, brushing his cigarette ashes from the documents, stamped a permit and wished me good luck. “Be careful of the wild boars if you go back in the thickets,” he warned.

He also told me to look up a man named Torg while I was there, a Danish bird researcher who had permits to work in the Coto and was living at the research station there.

On the way out of the city, I crossed over once more the Guadalquivir River. It was hard to believe that this shallow brown watercourse with its floating debris of branches and swirling islands of dried grasses from upstream once carried out from the city of Seville most of the Spanish trading vessels that set sail for the New World in the sixteenth century. The city had become established as a major European trading center in the world economy late in the fifteenth century, after the first voyages of Columbus, and the river, which had been an important shipping route during the time of the Moors, then became the major commercial route for the great fleets of Spanish galleons that sailed between Seville and the Americas. Shipping included the large fighting galleons as well as the smaller trading vessels known as carracks, and the even smaller but more maneuverable caravels.

Once in the open countryside I began encountering one of the dreaded conditions of cyclists in open country. Worse than high hills, or steep hills, or even mountains, is a steady headwind. Hills and mountains have down slopes; the wind never quits. Great hot blasts began buffeting me irregularly and for an hour or two, bent low in low gears, I pedaled against them.

All of the trade that made its way from the port of Seville was driven by wind, although ultimately it was also driven by a singular idea that somehow entered the mind of an otherwise little known and not entirely skilled sea captain, known as Columbus. The intent of the Spanish and Portuguese explorers of this period, as all American sixth graders know (or used to know, at least), was to find a short route to the Indies. Before Columbus, all trade with the East either went overland from Europe or by sea, down the west coast of Africa and then back up through the Indian Ocean. But in January of 1492, in Granada, the last of the once powerful Moorish kings surrendered what was left of Al Andalus to the sovereigns of Aragon and Castile, Ferdinand and Isabella, the so-called Reyes Católicos. With the reconquest complete, the Catholic Kings, feeling that the presence of Moors and Jews would be an impediment to their ideal of a Spanish unity, expelled them from the peninsula and began a period of expansion that would last for two hundred years.

For six years prior to this event, Columbus had directed appeals to Queen Isabella for support of his idea of a route westward to the Orient. How he got the idea to sail west in order to find a short route to the East is not known. But finally, not long after the fall of Granada, Isabella agreed to allow him to attempt his voyage and named him Admiral of the Ocean Sea. She granted him a contract to any new lands that he might discover and granted him, further, a tenth part of all the wealth that he might find, in pearls or precious stones, or gold or silver or spices. Columbus was already over forty; he had gray hair, and a long career as a local sea captain. But this was no ordinary voyage. His persistent advocacy of this singular idea effectively altered the cultures of the globe, spread Europe far beyond its borders, and begat a vast redistribution of life-forms that continues to this day. The event also effectively destroyed the native cultures that were then thriving in the Americas.

Columbus did not know what was beyond the horizon west of the Canary Islands and the Azores when he set out in the summer of 1492, nor did he know that he would have fair winds all the way west. But he had spent some time on the Portuguese island of Madeira and it is thought that he may have heard from sailors there of a prevailing easterly wind just to the south. He also knew that all the Portuguese voyages of discovery that had ventured west from the Azores had run into contrary winds. So he sailed south some seven hundred miles, refitted his ships in the Canaries, and on Thursday, September 6th, departed from the harbor at San Sebastián de la Gomera and with light following winds sailed into the unknown. Two days later, in the night, Columbus picked up a strong easterly breeze and found himself in the rumored band of favorable winds for the rest of the voyage.

Day after day for four weeks he sailed westward with his small flotilla of three vessels. On the seventeenth of September something went awry with his compass and it would no longer register true north. The crew became concerned. There were grumblings. The rumored edge of the flat earth could lie ahead. But Columbus claimed the variation was due to nothing more than their westward position. He was guessing, but it turns out he was right. They were now far enough west to alter the bearings of magnetic north and the north star.

The little group sailed on. More leagues covered, more empty ocean. Columbus spotted crabs and claimed that they were a sign that the ships were near land. But there was none in sight the next day, nor the next. Then he saw cumulus clouds and claimed again that they were near land. Then the crew saw a length of sugarcane and a small carved stick float by, and a few nights later Columbus saw, so he said, a light gleaming to the west and announced that they would find land the next morning. At dawn there was no land.

Finally, on the eve of the twelfth of October in the moonlight they saw a low-lying coast and hove to. In the morning, they saw the islands of the Bahamas, unfurled their flags, blessed their god and rowed ashore. On shore they found palm trees, and many ponds, and grassy plains. They signed themselves. They smelled the fresh earth and drank fresh waters, and then the following day a company of bronze-colored people emerged from the thick groves of palms. Presuming himself on an island off the coast of India, he called the people
Indios
—Indians.

There is a good physical explanation for the prevailing easterly winds that carried Columbus westward to this “new” world, and as with so many earthly phenomena, it begins with the sun. Because of the angle of the earth to the sun, solar radiation streaming off this supercharged star makes a direct hit on the equatorial regions of the planet. This heated air rises and thereby creates a zone of low pressure around the equator known as the doldrums, a region of hot humid air and sticky, dead calms, interspersed with towering thunderheads and broken with short bursts of heavy rains. This rising, warmed air flows outward toward the cooler regions of the poles thereby creating a vacuum in the equatorial regions, into which the cooler surface winds rush from both north and south. But as the surface winds flow back in toward the equator, they are turned by the spin of the earth, a phenomenon known as the Coriolis effect. Since these winds flow from east to west just north and south of the equator, they are known as the easterlies, and they are, as all transatlantic sailors know, among the most reliable and predictable breezes on earth. By leaving from as far south as the Canaries, Columbus had happened upon them. Had he left from the Azores, he might well have turned back.

But there is more to exploration than the outbound voyage. All explorers from the European continent had to come home to tell the tale, and this too involves the solar-based planetary conditions that create a fair wind for the return trip to Europe. The rising warm air over the doldrums sinks back to earth around 35 degrees north and south of the equator, a region known to sailors as the horse latitudes. The air masses in this region are churned by a combination of the Coriolis effect and areas of high and low pressure, which creates prevailing westerly winds.

These east and west winds provided mariners with a regular system of shipping lanes. After Columbus, a set course of trade developed. Adventurers, colonists, and Spanish grandees would sail southwestward from the Guadalquivir, catch the prevailing easterlies for the outbound voyage, load up with gold and spices, subdue the locals, put down colonies, and then sail north to the region around northern Florida or Georgia to pick up the westerlies for the long voyage home.

Within these churned-up, complex bands of moving air there are local disturbances caused by varying landforms, mountains, cold or warm sea currents, sun-heated deserts, and polar regions. These have begotten a variety of sometimes predictable, sometimes erratic winds that have acquired names: the Elephanta of the Malabar Coast in southwest India, for example, or the chill Mistral of the Rhone Valley in France; the Sirocco that blows off the dry deserts of North Africa, bringing clouds of red dust into southern Europe; the Föhn; and the Churada, and the hot-breathed Harmattan of the Sahara; the Helm of England, which blows in from the Pennine Chain; and the Penente of Italy, the Purga and the Buran of Siberia, the Khamsin of Egypt, the Melteme of Greece. For every region on earth there are named winds, in fact there are some four hundred names for different winds around the globe and these winds bring forth, in their various seasons, recognized changes in the collective mood of the human community—headaches caused by the Föhn, for example, irritability from the Santa Ana, depressions, elations, bad luck, good luck, evil days, and propitious hours.

Our science tells us, and we believe it for the most part, that all these winds of the earth are caused by the Coriolis effect and the spin of the planet and the fact that the continuous furnace of nuclear fusion streaming off our nearest star heats the tropical regions of the planet. But as with so many stories of creation, there are other explanations.

The seafaring Greeks believed that the winds of the earth were housed on a cliff in the Tyrrhenian Sea, kept in a cave by their overlord, the god Aeolus. Here dwelt Zephyros, the gentle west wind, and Boreas, the chill wind from the north, and Notos, who brought rain from the south, and Eurus, the ill-tempered wind from the east. Odysseus, on his way home from Troy, stopped to visit Aeolus, who instructed Zephyros to carry him safely back to Ithaca. He tied the other winds up in a goatskin sack and told Odysseus not to open it. With a fair wind and following seas, the company of sailors was soon within sight of Ithaca, but the greedy crew, thinking there was gold inside, opened the bag while Odysseus was sleeping. Out burst the angry winds of the north and the east, and sent the vessel scudding back to sea. It took Odysseus twenty more years to get back home. At the culmination of his voyaging, he and his men landed on the Island of the Sun. Here, while Odysseus slept, his men made the mistake of killing and roasting the favored cattle of the sun, who grazed on the island. Instantly there arose a mighty wind out of the west, and the blast snapped the forestays of the ship's mast; the vessel foundered and sank, with all hands, save Odysseus, who clung to the keel and the broken mast and after ten days finally washed up on Calypso's island, where he lived for the next eight years.

In North America, the Abenaki of northern New England claim that there is a mountain peak in the far north where, on top, lives a giant eagle that continuously flaps his wings, thus creating all the winds of earth. In Central Asia there is a mountain, possibly the same one since the Abenaki originated in Central Asia, where, according to legend, there is a hole, and from this hole winds issue at tremendous force.

In Central America the Aztecs, whose culture was destroyed by those Sevillanos and Castilians who, riding the easterlies, came after Columbus, believed that the sun god begat an associate deity, a god of the wind. In time he evolved into a dragonlike, flying figure, a serpent with wings whom they called Quetzalcoatl. He was a god of extreme purity, a kindly benevolent redeemer who gave his blood for humankind. But like many gods of old, in the time of the Aztecs, the story held that Quetzalcoatl had gone away. He promised to return, though.

There are winds that are known to be spirits of the dead. There are winds in some cultures that are carried in a sack by ancient figures who live in the mountains. There are winds that are dragons, and there are many winds that are horses (and many horses, it should be added, that were inseminated by the winds). And there is a mysterious, sun-heated desert wind in the Middle East that has no known source but has miraculous powers. In one local folktale it parted the sea, allowing an army to pass, and then closed up again, enveloping a pursuing enemy army. In another story this wind collapsed the house of a powerful local chieftain, killing all his sons. It brought plagues, and carried locusts, and swirled around mountaintops, and, as if in recognition of its fiery source, it had the ability to burst into flaming bushes. Sometimes it even spoke out loud. A wandering tribe of pastoralists in the region named this wind
ruwach
. The word meant, by association, a blast of air, or whirlwind. It also meant breath, or powerful breath, and finally it meant spirit, a very powerful spirit, so powerful that the tribal people refused even to utter its name. We here in the West are more direct (or less respectful) and have translated
ruwach
as God, the unspeakable Yahweh of the ancient Hebrews.

By late afternoon the wind dropped and the road south to the Coto began to descend through rolling hills with pastures where rough-looking fighting bulls of the Romero family were grazing. There was no traffic, I was alone in the fading green light, separated from these trained killing bulls by a thin strand of wire alone, and as I pedaled along, I began to appreciate the bravery of the matador, John Fulton. He was just a good American boy from Philadelphia, an artist, who had somehow become fascinated with the
corrida
. Seeing these great, heavy-shouldered, full-horned bulls eyeing me as I innocently pedaled by gave me a chill. But I forged on to Castilleja del Campo and ate some pork sandwiches with a glass of
tinto
to calm my bull-tormented nerves, and then rode on to Carrion de los Cespedes.