AN hour after moonrise we were gone from Gomera. At first a light wind
filled the sails, but when the round moon went down in the west and
the sun rose, there was Teneriffe still at hand, and the sea glassy.
It rested like a mirror all that day, and the sails hung empty and the
banner at maintop but a moveless wisp of cloth. In the night arose a
contrary wind, and another red dawn showed us Teneriffe still. The wind
dropping like a shot, we hung off Ferro, fixed in blue glass. Watch was
kept for the Portuguese, but they also would be rooted to sea bottom.
The third morning up whistled the wind, blowing from Africa and filling
every sail.
Palos to the Canaries, we had sailed south. Now for long, long days
the sun rose right aft, and when it set dyed with red brow and eyes
and cheek and breast of the carved woman at our prow. She wore a great
crown, and she looked ever with wide eyes upon the west that we chased.
Straight west over Ocean-Sea, the first men, the first ships! If ever
there had been others, our world knew it not. The Canaries sank into the
east. Turn on heel around one’s self, and mark never a start of land to
break the rim of the vast sea bowl! Never a sail save those above us of
the _Santa Maria_, or starboard or larboard, the Pinta and the Nina. The
loneliness was vast and utter. We might fail here, sink here, die here,
and indeed fail and sink and die alone!
Two seamen lay sick in their beds, and the third day from Gomera the
Santa Maria’s physician, Bernardo Nunez, was seized with the same
malady. At first Fray Ignatio tried to take his place, but here the monk
lacked knowledge. One of the sailors died, a ship boy sickened, and the
physician’s fever increased upon him. Diego de Arana began to fail. The
ship’s master came at supper time and looked us over. “Is there any here
who has any leechcraft?”
Beltran the cook said, “I can set a bone and wash a wound; but it ends
there!”
Cried Fernando from his corner. “Is the plague among us!” The master
turned on him. “Here and now, I say five lashes for the man who says
that word again! Has any man here sense about a plain fever?”
None else speaking, I said that long ago I had studied for a time with
a leech, and that I was somewhat used to care of the sick. “Then you
are my man!” quoth the master, and forthwith took me to the Admiral. I
became Juan Lepe, the physician.
It was, I held, a fever received while wandering through the ravines and
woods of Gomera. Master Bernardo had in his cabin drugs and tinctures,
and we breathed now all the salt of Ocean-Sea, and the ship was clean. I
talked to Beltran the cook about diet, and I chose Sancho and a man that
I liked, one Luis Torres, for nurses. Two others sickened this night,
and one the next day, but none afterward. None died; in ten days all
were recovered. Other ailments aboard I doctored also. Don Diego de
Arana was subject to fits of melancholy with twitchings of the body.
I had watched Isaac the Physician cure such things as this, and now I
followed instruction. I put my hands upon the patient and I strengthened
his will with mine, sending into him desire for health and perception of
health. His inner man caught tune. The melancholy left him and did not
return. Master Bernardo threw off the fever, sat up and moved about. But
he was still weak, and still I tended the others for him.
The _Pinta_ had signaled four men ill. But Garcia Fernandez, the Palos
physician, was there with Martin Pinzon, and the sick recovered. The
Nina had no doctor and now she came near to the Santa Maria and sent a
boat. She had five sick men and would borrow Bernardo Nunez.
The Admiral spoke with Nunez, now nearly well. Then the physician made a
bundle of drugs and medicaments, said farewell to all and kindly enough
to me, and rowed away to the _Nina_. He was a friend of the Pinzons, and
above the vanity of the greater ship. The sick upon the Nina prospered
under him.
But Juan Lepe was taken from the forecastle, and slept where Nunez had
slept, and had his place at the table in the great cabin. He turned from
the sailor Juan Lepe to the physician Juan Lepe, becoming “Doctor” and
“Senor.” The wheel turns and a man’s past makes his present.
A few days from Gomera, an hour after sunset, the night was torn by the
hugest, flaming, falling star that any of us had ever seen. The mass
drove down the lower skirt of the sky, leaving behind it a wake of fire.
It plunged into the sea. There is no sailor but knows shooting stars.
But this was a hugely great one, and Ocean-Sea very lonely, and to most
there our errand a spectral and frightening one. It needed both the
Admiral and Fray Ignatio to quell the panic.
The next day a great bird like a crane passed over the _Santa Maria_. It
came from Africa, behind us. But it spoke of land, and the sailors gazed
wistfully.
This day I entered the great cabin when none was there but the Admiral,
and again he sat at table with his charts and his books. He asked of the
sick and I answered. Again he sat looking through open door and window
at blue water, a great figure of a man with a great head and face and
early-silvered hair. “Do you know aught,” he asked, “of astrology?”
I answered that I knew a little of the surface of it.
“I have a sense,” he said, “that our stars are akin, yours and mine. I
felt it the day Granada fell, and I felt it on Cordova road, and again
that day below La Rabida when we turned the corner and the bells rang
and you stood beside the vineyard wall. Should I not have learned in
more than fifty years to know a man? The stars are akin that will endure
for vision’s sake.”
I said, “I believe that, my Admiral.”
He sat in silence for a moment, then drew the log between us and turned
several pages so that I might see the reckoning. “We have come well,” I
said. “Yet with so fair a wind, I should have thought--”
He turned the leaves till he rested at one covered with other figures.
“Here it is as it truly is, and where we truly are! We have oversailed
all that the first show, and so many leagues besides.”
“Two records, true and untrue! Why do you do it so?”
“I have told them that after seven hundred leagues we should find land.
Add fifty more for our general imperfection. But it may be wider than
I think. We may not come even to some fringing island in eight hundred
leagues, no, nor in more than that! If it be a thousand, if it be two
thousand, on I go! But after the seven hundred is passed, it will be
hard to keep them in hand. So, though we are covering more, I let them
think we are covering only this.”
I could but laugh. Two reckonings! After all, he was not Italian for
nothing!
“The master knows,” he said, “and also Diego de Arana. But at least one
other should know. Two might drown or perish from sickness. I myself
might fall sick and die, though I will not believe it!” He paused a
moment, then said, looking directly at me, “I need one in whom I can
utterly confide. I should have had with me my brother Bartholomew. But
he is in England. A man going to seek a Crown jewel for all men should
have with him son or brother. Diego de Arana is a kinsman of one whom
I love, and he partly believes. But Roderigo Sanchez and the others
believe hardly at all. There is Fray Ignatio. He believes, and I confess
my sins to him. But he thinks only of penitents, and this matter needs
mind, not heart alone. Because of that sense of the stars, I tell you
these things.”
The next day it came to me that in that Journal which he meant to make
like Caesar’s Commentaries, he might put down the change in the _Santa
Maria’s_ physicians and set my name there too often. I watched my chance
and finding it, asked that he name me not in that book. His gray eyes
rested upon me; he demanded the reason for that. I said that in Spain I
was in danger, and that Juan Lepe was not my name. More than that I did
not wish to say, and perchance it were wiser for him not to know. But I
would not that the powerful should mark me in his Journal or elsewhere!
Usually his eyes were wide and filled with light as though it were sent
into them from the vast lands that he continuously saw. But he could be
immediate captain and commander of things and of men, and when that was
so, the light drew into a point, and he became eagle that sees through
the wave the fish. Had he been the seer alone, truly he might have been
the seer of what was to be discovered and might have set others upon the
path. But he would not have sailed on the _Santa Maria_!
In his many years at sea he must many times have met men who had put to
sea out of fear of land. He would have sailed with many whose names, he
knew, were not those given them at birth. He must have learned to take
reasons for granted and to go on--where he wished to go on. So we gazed
at each other.
“I had written down,” he said, “that you greatly helped the sick, and
upon Bernardo Nunez’s going to the _Nina_, became our physician. But I
will write no more of you, and that written will pass in the flood of
things to come.” After a moment, he ended with deliberation, “I know my
star to be a great star, burning long and now with a mounting flame. If
yours is in any wise its kin, then there needs must be histories.”