God Carlos (9 page)

Truly, he had his philosophical moments; without question, he was a thinker—not all the time, of course, for he was basically a man of deeds, not thought—but every now and again, he was capable of examining creation and probing its deficiencies. He was quite proud of himself.

So he walked the poop deck, kept an eye on the compass lit by the cresset, and thought deeply about the cracks in creation. But it was only a theoretical probing and just for fun, he hastily added in case a saint was listening. He had no complaints against the earth. It was a good place that God had created. It was a good ocean that the ship now sailed on—one of God's masterpieces. And to make sure that the saint understood, he recited the Pater Noster in Latin. He did not understand its words, but many years ago, like the other village boys, he had been forced to memorize it. And he knew it was a good, sturdy prayer that God and the angels liked to hear from the mouths of men.

When he had finished saying it, he felt refreshed and cleansed. The unthinking, reflexive Catholic inside him imagined grace flooding into his soul and healing it. But then, in the very next breath, his mind turned to de Morales and the shameless effrontery of the man to give him a mocking nickname and then use it in the presence of others to his face, and the rage that sluiced through his loins made him wish he could kill his tormentor all over again.

So his thoughts ranged from imagined bigness to unacknowledged littleness, from rote piety to reptilian rage, and through it all he did not recognize the truth about himself: that he was a little man with a little soul, and a little, puffed up, unknowing heart that would make him as menacing to his new surroundings as a mutant, rogue bacillus.

The grayness in which the ship sailed was dissolving, signaling daybreak, and in the breeze Carlos could now strongly smell land.

Never mind that others could not smell it. He knew it was there, just ahead, skulking under the horizon. It was the land of a fresh new world, where he would be regarded as a god from the sky. He would be a good god. His worshippers would grow to love him.

Just as he was beginning to once again dream of his godhood, just as he was savoring it anew like a child returning to play with a favorite toy, just as the dawn light was slowly releasing the ship from its gray webbing, came the excited cry of the Azorean lookout in the bow of the ship: “Land, dead ahead!”

De la Serena bounded out of his cabin and sprang to the deck with surprising agility for an old man. Scattered around the deck, sleeping sailors began to stir and stood up to look. There on the horizon loomed a gray smudge against the skyline.

De la Serena turned to Carlos with a big grin. “Your nose, señor,” he said effusively, “is a godlike instrument.”

And then, realizing that he had misspoken, the older man made a gesture of self-reproof and drifted away among the celebrating crewmen. But Carlos was not angry. In fact, he was so pleased to have the ship owner talk to him with such respect that he mumbled, “Thank you, señor.”

De la Serena, however, did not hear. Already he was craning toward the approaching, unseen land.

He sent the boy Pedro to fetch the charts from down below, and he sent another boy for the astrolabe—the primitive instrument mariners of his day used to navigate. He wanted to know, as close as possible, where the ship was, for he had the sailor's distrust of strange landforms. Around him, the crew, now eagerly awake, gathered, chattering with energy and goodwill.

On his orders, the
Santa Inez
hove to and slowly drifted to a near standstill. Ahead of her, skewered on her bowsprit, lay the New World.

Chapter 10

The
Santa Inez
drifted until the rising sun etched the contours of the land ahead against the skyline. De la Serena consulted the chart, which was amateurishly drawn, and labored to calculate their position. He sent two seamen forward with a depth line and orders to keep a sharp eye out for the mottled brown stain of approaching shoals.

“It is Hispaniola,” de la Serena muttered repeatedly as he tried to match the island ahead with its crude image on the chart. While de la Serena pondered where they were, the
Santa Inez
jogged back and forth fretfully like a nervous bridegroom.

Eventually, de la Serena came to a decision and set a course that would take the ship toward the western tip of the land ahead and through the Windward Passage. On the charts the Windward Passage was marked as a zone of contrary winds, but he was hoping that the trades would continue to be favorable. His other choice was to go through the Mona Passage, which would take the
Santa Inez
on a longer, more roundabout way to Jamaica.

Among the sailors the sight of the landform looming ahead of the ship had sparked euphoria, and groups of them milled around the deck, chattering like children who had just suffered through the gloomy solemnities of High Mass on Easter Sunday. Everyone was suddenly in a good mood, and the surge of camaraderie led to some good-natured joshing and wrestling.

De la Serena called a public prayer, and the men quickly assembled in a somber line with their heads bowed, looking properly solemn as the ship owner gave voice to their thanks to God for allowing their ship to survive this long passage at sea.

Carlos bowed his head also, bitterly reflecting on this display of hypocrisy. He did not look at de la Serena during the recital of the prayer and wondered if anyone else on board knew the man's true feelings about religion.

After the prayer, the crew dispersed, some of the men continuing the lighthearted horseplay. Ahead of the surging ship the land swelled slowly in the morning sunlight, rising regally out of a bed of sparkling water, and the eye could make out a rangy green mountain towering above the seashore and wreathed at its foothills by a luxuriant forest. It was like watching a beautiful woman stepping slowly out of a bath and stretching herself, and the men alternated between babbling happily like children and simply staring at the lovely landform dripping with morning mist and sunrise dimness.

But the wind was contrary, and the
Santa Inez
was slowly forced to fall off until, in spite of her attempts to claw her way toward the Windward Passage, she nearly got caught in the irons, her sails flapping wildly, and had to reach parallel to the shore. With the land off her windward beam, the ship drove languidly through a calm sea crinkled with catpaws and the occasional groundswell where the ocean peeled off swollen mounds of water and sent them tumbling gently toward the shoreline like a caress. The wind held and before evening they could see the Mona Passage between Puerto Rico and Hispaniola exactly as it was marked on the crude map. But de la Serena did not want to attempt the passage with night falling, so he gave orders for the ship to heave to and wait out the darkness. Some of the men grumbled that they could have been ashore by now, but deep in their hearts, as much as they hungered to feel land under their feet, they knew that to lie offshore was prudent.

Night fell over the ship like a blanket suddenly dropping from the sky. One minute the earth was lit and the ocean and strange land off the beam of the ship bathed in the innocence of sunshine, and the next the whole world was blinded by a menacing darkness. The
Santa Inez
hove to, her sails flapping listlessly.

De la Serena doubled the watch, and dispatched two men with a depth line to sound out the bottom every hour on the hour.

Carlos came on watch at midnight. The land hulked in the darkness like a shipwreck, and in the distance the eye could make out none of its distinguishing features, seeing only a more solid lump of looming darkness.

“Do you know what that is, Carlos?” de la Serena asked in a conspiratorial whisper. “It is land unnamed. On the maps, its promontories and capes are blanks. Two hundred years from now, every piece of it, every mountain, every cove, will be named. Now it is terra incognito.”

Carlos was unimpressed, and it showed in the piggish grunt that sprang from him in reply.

“Perhaps that should be Point de la Serena,” the older man said. “Or why not Cape de la Serena? Or Mount de la Serena? Who would deny me Cove de la Serena?”

“Why not buy the whole Jamaica, then, señor, and give it your name?” Carlos muttered.

De la Serena did not hear the sarcasm in the seaman's tone. Perhaps it was the night or the long voyage that was coming to an end, but he eagerly seized on the suggestion and began to pace the poop deck in a spasm of excitement. “Who gave that island its name, anyway?” he asked speculatively, on his second turn around the deck. “I read that it was the Indians. What do they know? It is a word from their barbarous tongue. It is a word without meaning. Why shouldn't Jamaica be named
de la Serena
? There is no good reason! Can you think of one?”

“Other than local custom, no, señor,” Carlos mumbled. He was not yet fully awake, being one of those people to whose senses sleep clings like a bedimming cobweb long after they've risen.

“It is a wonderful idea, Carlos,” de la Serena breathed fervently, pausing in his agitated pacing. “I have read that unlike Hispaniola, Jamaica is doing poorly as a colony. I wonder who owns it.”

Carlos grew sullen, regarding the whole conversation as a ridiculous daydream, so he said nothing lest he say the wrong thing. But the older man's eyes were burning at him in the flaring glow of the cresset as if expecting an answer.

“God?” he mumbled.

“There is no god, remember? It must be owned by the Columbus heirs and the Crown.”

The vessel shuddered under them, and de la Serena looked quickly at Carlos.

“It is the wind that is shifting,” Carlos said quickly. “Helmsman,” he bawled down at the steering quarters, “hard astarboard!”

“Hard astarboard,” the helmsman replied, his voice echoing from below deck.

The
Santa Inez
lumbered wheezily to the left, her sails spilling the wind and fluttering like beating wings.

In 1520,
hard astarboard
meant pushing the tiller to the right, which turned the ship to the left. This ridiculous misnomer continued until the ill-fated
Titanic
sank and the stupidity of ancient maritime terminology became public in the subsequent investigative hearings. But for now, to go to the left, the command was bellowed to the helmsman to push the tiller to the right.

In any event, once more the
Santa Inez
hove to—her head into the wind, her sails fluttering uselessly—and drifted listlessly under the night sky. Off her starboard beam, the unlit, hulking mass of Hispaniola loomed above the starlit sea, and in the distance they could hear the rattle of surf warning of an ironbound shoreline.

 

* * *

 

Daylight sprang on the ship like a hungry predator, and under the direction of de la Serena, she scooped up the wind in her trimmed sails and began jogging toward the Mona Passage. Off her port beam, the lumpy island of Puerto Rico crouched. Off her starboard, the whitened, stony claws of Hispaniola slid past. Ahead of the ship was Mona Island, impaled in the middle of the passage. The charts indicated an area of shoals radiating outward from the solitary island planted right in the center of the projected route of the ship. De la Serena set a course to keep the island on his starboard beam, and the
Santa Inez
driven by a favorable wind slipped through the passage. By nightfall, Mona Island was astern, and the
Santa Inez
had caught the local trades and was steering northeast for Jamaica.

Around the ship, instead of the barren emptiness of deep sea, the coastline of an edenic island—green and aromatic—opened like a wildflower. The breeze smelled of land, and with every deep breath the crewmen filled their lungs with the fresh fragrance of creation. The waters under the ship teemed with life, and so bountiful was the fishing that the cook respectfully asked the men to land no more fish. Ahead of the ship, Jamaica lay just below the horizon.

De la Serena kept a respectful distance between his vessel and the coastline of Hispaniola. The charts warned him of the approach of what would come to be known as Cabo Beata and the Splinter of Beata—a razor-sharp rock which thrusts a pointed lance offshore in a bed of shoals that threatens to rip open the hull of any unwary ship.

The ship ghosted through the starry night to fresh air as sharp and clear as mountain spring water, and the intoxicating nearness of land so excited her crew that many could not sleep and paced the deck restlessly, chattering eagerly like dickering moneylenders.

Soon the island stabbed the tusk of a green mountain out of the ocean, and the air was filled with the fragrances of wildflowers and blossoming trees.

“It is Jamaica!” de la Serena announced joyfully to all within earshot. Then he added wistfully to himself, sotto voce, “One day may it be known as the Island of de la Serena.”

 

* * *

 

The
Santa Inez
did not know exactly where to go, and it showed from her erratic movements that first morning off the coastline of Jamaica. De la Serena had a vague idea where the first settlement had been established.Somewhere on the north coast, near where his ship was at the moment, there was a settlement named Seville la Nueva—New Seville—but exactly where he did not know. He sent a man topside to the crow's nest to search for the settlement, promising a reward to the first sailor to spot it.

The ship behaved like a lost animal trying to find its burrow, nosing her way into coves, easing perilously close to the shoreline, and darting quickly out to sea again when the water became too shallow. She was zigzagging close to the shoreline like a fretful moth dancing around an open flame when the crow's nest lookout cried, “Señor! A boat!” and pointed to a canoe that had just cleared a cove and was heading out to sea.

There was a single person in the canoe, and he was propelling his craft with a piece of wood that he dipped into the water with a strange motion.