God Carlos (2 page)

Yet though he had a mad dream of being born divine, he was not mad. He knew the difference between the real world in which he scrounged daily and the dream world to which he occasionally retreated for solace. And standing in the street of Cádiz, Spain, on this Thursday evening of March 8, 1520, he knew that he had to quickly find a place to sleep. With only forty maravedis left to his name, he also needed to find a ship that would hire him on as a seaman.

When he had first stepped into the whore's room, he had hoped that she would like him well enough to ask him to spend the night. Such a wonderful thing had happened to Manuel a year ago, or so his shipmate had boasted. But such things never happened to him.

He sighed again. He was standing on a narrow dirt side street near the waterfront, and the shadows that stretched out all around him foretold the falling night. He could smell the tang of saltwater in the breeze. Over the roof of a distant building across the street, he could glimpse the masts of tied-up ships. He knew what he had to do, but he stood there outside the whore's lodgings glancing around as if he were lost.

He was not lost. He was in Cádiz. But he was befuddled and nearly penniless. All he had to his credit was his serpentine name—Carlos Antonio Maria Eduardo Garcia de la Cal Fernandez.

 

* * *

 

Cádiz, already an old city even in the sixteenth century, having been founded by the Phoenicians in 1000 BC, lay at the center of the exploratory movement ever since Columbus had made his historic voyage to the New World. Only a few months earlier, Magellan had set out to sea on the first attempt to sail completely around the world. With Charles V sitting on the throne, Spain was prosperous and powerful. Her reach extended to the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Artois, and Franche-Comté, Aragón, Navarre, Granada, Naples, Sicily, Sardinia, and Spanish America. The Jews had been expelled almost thirty years earlier, and the suppression of the remaining Muslims had begun with Isabella's decree of the 12th of February, 1502, which separated all Muslim males under the age of fourteen and all females under the age of twelve from their families and turned them over to the church to be brought up as Christians. It would spark another interval of bloodletting in the name of God—a favorite pastime of Europeans.

None of this was known to him, however, for he barely knew how to read, and there were no newspapers or magazines to tell him what was happening in the world. Even so, it is unlikely that he would've been interested. He did not have a mind for current events. He was only interested in keeping his belly full and finding someplace warm to spend cold nights. He did not care about causes or principles. He knew that the world was round, for he had glimpsed its curvature from the crow's nest of a ship sailing the deep sea, but he did not care whether or not anyone actually proved it.

As he stood on the street, the stench of raw sewage rose up all around him and made his eyes run. It was evening and the citizens of Cádiz were emptying their chamber pots in the street, leaving a ghastly, fetid trail of freshly deposited excrement whose malodorous vapors gave off a poisonous stench.

Looking around him at the dingy shops and unreinforced masonry houses, smelling the pungent refuse splattered all over the rutted dirt road still muddy and drooling with runoff from the recent rains, he remembered again why he loved the sea, why he could not abide land and land-bound people. It was the stench of land that he abhorred, the perpetual miasma that arose from it. Wherever people herded together in great numbers, they gave off a collective stink that bedaubed even the breeze. Everything they touched, everything they brushed against, absorbed their stench. The land, the plants, the very animals became impregnated with their stink.

At sea a boat had its stink spots too, but it was a localized stench like a laborer's armpits that one could walk away from. Moreover, the sea breezes were natural cleansers that would sweep away any miasmatic buildup and freshen both man and vessel with the delicate aroma of saltwater.

When the sea was kittenish with him, when his ship was scudding along in a following breeze and the workload easy, he would feel light-headed with exhilaration and joy and wonder how any man with a heart could live anywhere else.

But he was a hardened enough seaman to know that the ocean was fickle and unforgiving. He had already suffered shipwreck. He had lost crewmates on other voyages. Once, after a hurricane, he had drifted clinging to flotsam for eight hours before another ship happened by and saved his life.

So he had no illusions about the sea. It was not a romance for him. All he knew was that land was dirty and stank and was filled with strange people and customs that could drive a man mad and goad him to the deadly sins of covetousness and envy. The sea, on the other hand, was clean and sweet smelling like a freshly bathed and powdered woman.

He was eager and ready to go to sea again, to escape the nasty clutch of land. If he could find a ship about to sail and sign on, perhaps the master would allow him to sleep on the deck, and he wouldn't have to pay a night's lodging. If that did not happen, and if the cheaper inns were full, he would have to sleep on the streets. He had done that many times before. He did not want to do it tonight, for at this time of the year, the night chill could bite down to the very bone.

He set off toward the waterfront, headed for the tangle of masts looming above the rooflines of the surrounding buildings. As he crossed the street, he took care, like everyone else around him, to step cautiously around the piles of excrement that mounded everywhere in his path like poisonous toadstools.

Madre de Dios, he asked himself, was there a more wretched place on this earth than the infernal land?

Chapter 3

Cádiz is nestled on the tip of an isthmus strategically located on the Atlantic Ocean near the narrow mouth of the Mediterranean Sea. Not far away, across the Straits of Gibraltar, looms the dark forehead of vast Africa with its ancient lands of Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia—kingdoms once populated by Berbers, a motley Afro-Asiatic people who sprang from an unknown origin and covered caves with painted images dating back to 6500 BC Next to Algeria on the simian brow of Africa lies Morocco, another ancient kingdom repeatedly overrun by invaders, from the Phoenicians of the twelfth century BC and later the Carthaginians, the Romans, and the Vandals—all of these, kingdoms that came and went on the world stage like surging swarms of locusts.

Carlos knew about none of this history though its teachings and lessons had been subtly imprinted on his soul and informed his outlook in ways that he could only act out but did not understand. He was barely able to read, having had only three years of schooling at the hands of an overworked village priest who was ahead of his time in his belief in public education. What Carlos was proudest of was that he had learned to write his first name in a shaky cursive hand and did not, like most of his shipmates, have to mark an imbecilic X when he signed up to work on a ship.

On his way to the quay, he encountered a beggar whom bone disease had twisted into a misshapen caricature of the human body, and desiring God's mercy after his sinful encounter with the whore, Carlos dug deep into his pocket and fished out a single maravedi, which he flipped to the wretched man, drawing peals of extravagant blessings that God would surely not overlook.

He was whistling merrily when he finally came to the waterfront. The smell of fish assailed his nose and, as he turned a corner, a tangle of masts and rigging hung like an enormous spiderweb above ships tied up abeam on the quay. A gale churning over the Atlantic had sent many vessels scurrying into Cádiz as a haven from the storm, where they now bobbed disheveled and weather beaten.

Scattered over the quay was a familiar ensemble of castaways, adventurers, ship jumpers, whores, scavengers, cutthroats, pickpockets, and foreigners—the same found in dirty waterfronts all over this rounded earth. Some scruffy characters ambled aimlessly past the ships; others slouched against the stained walls of stone warehouses, staring blurrily at memories of distant shores or long-lost sweethearts left behind in faraway homelands. Here and there men skulked in the shadows, scanning every stranger with a vague predatory curiosity. Some seamen huddled together in boisterous discussion about voyages and adventures they had survived. On a few of the tied-up ships, sailors squatted on deck splicing ropes or patching sails. One grommet was cleaning the foredeck of a noa with soapstone. Trolling the banks of the quay for customers were a couple of painted, aged whores. Beyond the ships and the human jetsam unfurled the open ocean, crinkled and gray in the distance, and far out to sea Carlos could glimpse an ominously dark squall line that made a sailor give thanks for solid land underfoot.

He walked slowly down the quay, eyeing the lashed-together vessels, appraising each one with a practiced eye. He passed frigates, dismissing out of hand those equipped with oars. An impatient master who found himself on a windless sea would have his men break their backs with rowing. For similar reasons, he turned up his nose at an opulent-looking brigantine and passed up several coastal barks. He had a personal distaste for hybrid vessels that combined sails with oars. Such ships were usually not only ungainly under sail, but nearly impossible to row.

He strolled past a weather-beaten noa, looming bulky over the neighboring vessels, her high forecastle and raised quarterdeck giving her a top-heavy profile.

A noa was not a bad ship. Christopher Columbus himself, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, dead these past fourteen years now, God rest his soul, had chosen a noa—the famed
Santa Maria
—for his flagship. Yet Carlos still preferred a vessel that did not brandish a broad beam and high freeboard at capricious seas. Such a vessel was wonderful for running before a following wind but handled poorly to windward.

What he wanted was to find a sturdy sailer such as a caravel, particularly one headed for the New World. He had been to Africa. He had scoured the length and breadth of the Mediterranean, sailing as far away as Crete. He was tired of these old seas and their nasty ports.

On waterfronts all over the Mediterranean and Atlantic the talk was of the New World and the strange, exotic people who lived in it. Carlos had never seen one of these creatures himself, but he'd heard many drunken exaggerations about them. The women, it was said, walked around naked as the day they were born and gave freely of their affections to strangers. One sailor who claimed his cousin's brother-in-law had shipped on the second voyage of discovery with the Admiral of the Ocean Sea himself swore that there were so many lovely available women that the intemperate man could easily kill himself with too much lovemaking.

He was musing quietly to himself about sailing to an exotic land where all the woman were lovely and willing when he heard a voice hailing him. One of the blessed saints had heard his prayers, perhaps St. Anthony, and answered them, for right before him was a caravel whose low rakish waterline bespoke a ship loaded and ready for sea. Painted on her bow was her name,
Santa Inez.

From her raised quarterdeck, a man in his later years, who carried himself with the authority of a master, was calling him.

“I said, are you looking for a ship?”

 

* * *

 

At first, Carlos admitted nothing. He had learned a long time ago that in a new situation it was better to listen than to talk. So he was cryptic and noncommittal in his replies, irritating the stranger, who said he was from Mallorca. He said he was master of this ship, which would sail tomorrow for the New World, but he was shorthanded because unexpected death had visited his crew. If he was an experienced sailor looking for a ship, here was opportunity.

“What's your name?” the stranger asked.

“Carlos.”

“I am Alonso de la Serena, and this is my ship,” the stranger said, pounding the railing with his knuckles like a shopkeeper boasting about a new counter.

“Where are you bound?” Carlos asked diffidently.

“To Jamaica, where there are fortunes waiting to be made. Gold so plentiful that it washes down rivers like gravel. Labor so cheap that it costs a man nothing to put in a crop. Feed the natives, and they work like mules. A climate so beneficent that men live to be seventy and eighty years old without infirmity of mind or body because the air is so sweet and the nights so mild. It is a paradise that awaits us only a month's sail away.”

Carlos glanced at the ship, noting the neatness of the ropes and the cleanliness of the deck. He swept his eye over the main mast and noticed the tight furl of the sails. She was a three-masted lateener that bore the influence of Portuguese shipwrights, but she had been rerigged to fly a square sail, her lateen yards removed. Alonso anticipated his query.

“The wind will be behind us for most of the voyage. On the return, if we foolishly decide to leave paradise, we will ride the westerlies back to Spain. A lateen sail is difficult for running. It is the same change that Christopher Columbus made to his vessel.”

Carlos knew well the deficiencies of the lateen sail. He remembered the nightmare of steering a lateen-rigged frigate bound from Tangier for the west coast of Africa. The ship yawed badly, and with every little shift of the wind, the lateen had to be readjusted, which meant lowering the sail and hoisting it again on the other side of the main mast. Five men had to do this in the darkness with a lumpy following sea pounding them astern and the light from the three-quarter moon barely enough to illuminate the rigging. That was one of the worst nights he'd ever spent on a ship since he took to sea as a grommet of eleven—and it was all because of an unsuitable lateen sail. The Mallorcan was truly a seaman.

The discussion veered to the particulars. It was the particulars that drove sailors mad on a long voyage, the little pinpricks that the master would enforce at sea. Sometimes a man who was harsh in port turned into a mild and friendly master once the ship was underway. But more often than not, it was the opposite that was true—the man who was gentle when his feet were on land became a demon at sea. One had no way to predict this change, but Carlos had a theory. He had found that capricious and harsh masters showed their true underside in port when questioned on one issue: the sleeping arrangements permitted aboard ship.