FLOTSAM
/Don Pedro de Mendoza y Luna/, Count of Marcos and Grande of Spain,
opened his eyes and looked up through the pallid dawn at the grey
cloud masses overhead. It was some little while before his senses
understood what his eyes beheld. Then he grew conscious that, as he
lay there supine upon the shore, he was cold and stiff and sick. By
this he knew that he was still alive; though how it happened, and
where he might be, were matters yet to be investigated.
Painfully, upon joints that seemed almost to creak as they moved, he
brought himself to a sitting posture, and gazed out across the heavy
ground swell of the opal-tinted sea into the spreading flush of the
September dawn. His senses reeled under the effort, sky and sea and
land all rocked about him, and he was seized with nausea. He ached
from head to foot, ached as if he had been stretched upon the rack;
his eyes smarted acutely; there was an unspeakably bitter, briny taste
in his mouth, and his mind was in such troubled confusion that it
could render him no proper account of himself. He was conscious that
he lived and suffered. Beyond that it is to be doubted if he was so
much as conscious of his own identity.
His nausea increased, and he became violently sick, whereafter,
exhausted, Nature compelled him to lie down again. But as he lay now,
the oppressing cloud began to lift from his brain, clearing the
outlook for his consciousness. Soon memory resumed her sway. He sat up
again, more alertly this time, and at least no longer nauseated. His
eyes ranged once more over the sea, more purposefully now, seeking
upon the waters some sign of that towering galleon which had suffered
shipwreck in the night. The reef upon which she had gone to pieces
showed boldly in silhouette against the quickening sky, a black line
of jagged rocks upthrusting from a white foam of thundering breakers.
But of the galleon, not so much as a mast or spar was to be seen. And
the storm, too, had passed, its fury spent, leaving no indication of
its passage save that oily ground swell. Overhead the cloud mass was
being broken up, dissolving, and patches of blue sky became
increasingly revealed.
Don Pedro sat forward, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands,
his fine long fingers thrust into his damp, clammy hair. He remembered
now that dreadful swim of his, instinctive and without orientation in
the blackness of the night. The unquenchable animal instinct of
self-preservation it was that had compelled it. Reason had no part in
the effort. For whilst he possessed the clear assurance that land
could not be far, he had no means of telling in that impenetrable
darkness the direction in which it lay. Therefore, with little hope of
reaching it, he supposed himself to be swimming into eternity.
He remembered how, when exhaustion began at last to cramp his limbs
and paralyze further effort, he had commended his soul to his Maker,
to that God who had proved so extraordinarily insensible of the fact
that His were the battles which Don Pedro, and so many other tall
Spaniards now stiff and cold, had gone forth to fight. He remembered
how, in those last moments of consciousness, a wave had suddenly
seemed to seize him in its coils, lift him high and bear him swiftly
forward upon its crest, then loose its grip of him and leave him to
crash down upon the beach with a force that had driven out what little
breath yet lingered in his tortured lungs. He remembered his instant
deep thankfulness, quenched the next moment in the realization that he
was being sucked back by the undertow.
The horror of it was upon him again. He shuddered now as he thought of
the frenzy with which he had clawed that foreign shore, driving his
fingers deep into the sand, to grip and save himself from the maw of
hungry ocean before the strength to battle should be spent with
consciousness. That was the last thing he remembered. Between that
point and this there was a blank which his reason now set itself to
bridge.
The tide was on the ebb when they had struck the reef. This had
permitted his last effort to be availing. Thus had the retreating sea
been foiled of her prey. But, in faith, that monster had been fed to a
surfeit as it was. The galleon was gone and with her some three
hundred fine tall sons of Spain. Don Pedro checked the surge of
thankfulness for his own almost miraculous preservation. Was he, after
all, more fortunate than those who had perished? He had been dead, and
he was alive again. It amounted scarcely to less. The dark, dread
portals had been crossed when consciousness was extinguished. For what
had he been thrust back into the world of life? His respite in this
barbarous heretic excommunicate land could be no more than temporary.
Escape must be impossible. Upon discovery it would be demanded of him
that he suffer death again, and suffer it probably with indignity and
amid torments infinitely worse than those which last night he had
undergone. Far indeed from returning thanks for his preservation, let
him give rein to his envy of those compatriots of his who would wake
no more.
Drearily he looked about him, surveying the rocky little cove of that
nook-shotten isle on which the sea had spewed him up. The swiftly
growing light showed him a desolate, deserted space walled in by
cliffs like some vast prison. No dwelling was visible here or anywhere
on the heights above. All about him rose these sheer red cliffs
fringed on their summit by the long grass that was waving in the
freshening breeze.
He knew that he was somewhere upon the coast of Cornwall. This from
what the navigator of the galleon had told him last night just before
they were dashed upon the rocks by the fury of that infernal tempest
which had swept them leagues out of their course; a tempest which had
come down upon them just when they appeared to have weathered all
their perils, to have conquered adversity, and to confront a clear run
home to Spain. Never again would he behold the white walls of Vigo or
Santander upon which two days ago he had so confidently been expecting
soon to look.
In imagination a picture of them rose before him, all bathed in
sunshine, the vines all laden now with their rich ripe clusters among
which the brown-skinned, dark-eyed Galician or Asturian peasants would
be moving with their vintage-baskets on their shoulders, to pile from
these the grapes into the ponderous wooden bullock-carts identical in
every detail with those which the Romans had brought into Iberia
nearly two thousand years ago. He could hear them singing at their
labours, the wistful, heart-wringing songs of Spain, subtle compounds
of joy and melancholy that quicken a man’s blood. So confidently two
days ago had he been anticipating the sight of all this to heal the
wounds of body and of soul which they had taken in their ill-starred
adventure. From the white church on the summit there above Santander,
the Angelus of dawn would even now be ringing. As if he heard it with
the ears of his flesh, the homesick, storm-battered Don Pedro
disengaged his legs from a tangle of seaweed, struggled to his knees,
crossed himself, and recited the salutation to the Mother of God.
After that he sat down again dejectedly to consider anew his position.
Suddenly he laughed aloud, a laugh of deep and bitter irony. Laughed
at the contrast which he discovered between the manner of his coming
ashore in England and that which had so confidently been planned. He
had shared the assurance of his master, King Philip, in a triumphal
progress which no human power could withstand. He had looked upon
England as already beneath the heel of Spain, its bastard and
excommunicate Queen driven forth in ignominy, and this Augean stable
of heresy cleansed and purified and restored to the True Faith.
What else was to have been expected? Spain had launched upon the seas
an armament that was invincible by temporal forces, fortified by
spiritual weapons which must render it invulnerable to the Powers of
Hell, offering herself as an arm through which God should vindicate
His cause. It was incomprehensible, incredible that from the outset
the elements should appear to have stood in league with the heretics.
He reviewed the whole adventure from the first issuing of the fleet
from the Tagus, when at the very outset adverse winds had created
confusion, losses, and delays. In the Channel the wind had almost
constantly favoured the lighter craft of the endemonized heretical
dogs who had harried them. And even when all hope of effecting a
landing in England had been abandoned, and the surviving ships of the
Armada, driven to circumnavigate this barbarous island, asked no more
of Heaven than that they should be permitted to reach home again, the
elements had persisted in their incomprehensible hostility.
As far as the Orkneys they had hung together. There in a fog ten of
the galleons had gone astray. Sixty ships, including the Concepción
commanded by Don Pedro de Mendoza y Luna, had clung to the San
Martín, and with her had adventured farther north, running short of
food, the water fouling in their casks, and disease breaking out
amongst them. Their pressing needs drove them to seek the coast of
Ireland, where half of them were wrecked. In a gale off that Irish
coast the Concepción was separated from the remnant of the fleet at a
time when her crew were by thirst and famine rendered too exhausted to
handle her. By a miracle they made Killibeg, and here Don Pedro
obtained fresh provisions and fresh water. Thus he had been able to
revive his fainting seamen, preserving them only so that they might be
drowned upon the coast of Cornwall, from which he had been again
preserved, to end perhaps yet more miserably. Was there a curse upon
them that the gift of life at the hands of Heaven should be the gift
to be most feared?
Of the fate of the other consorts of Medina Sidonia’s flagship, Don
Pedro had no knowledge. But judging their case by his own when he had
parted from them, he had little cause to suppose that any of them
would ever reach Spain again, or if they reached it that they would
bear anything but skeletons into Spanish harbours.
In his dejection at this final ruin so far as he himself was
concerned, Don Pedro reflected that the ways of the Deity were
altogether beyond understanding. One explanation, it was true,
existed. The launching of the Armada might be regarded as an ordeal by
battle in the old sense: an appeal to God to deliver his judgment
between the old established faith and the reformed religion; between
the Pope and Luther, Calvin and the rest of the heresiarchs. Was it in
answer to this that God had spoken thus through the winds and the
waves which He controlled?
Don Pedro shuddered at the thought, which, as he himself perceived,
went perilously near to heresy. He dismissed it, and from the past
turned his attention more closely to the present and the future.
The sun was breaking through and quickening the dispersal from the
heavens of the cloudy remnants of last night’s tempest. Don Pedro rose
painfully to his feet and wrung what he could of the sea-water from
his doublet. He was a tall, gracefully shaped man of scarcely more
than thirty, and not even the sodden state of his garments could
extinguish their elegance. His dress alone would have proclaimed his
nationality. He was all in black, as became a noble of Spain and a lay
tertiary of Saint Dominic. His velvet doublet, peaked and tapering to
an almost womanish waist, was faintly wrought with golden arabesques.
In its present wet state it had almost the appearance of a damascened
cuirass. From a girdle of black leather embossed with gold, a heavy
dagger hung upon his right hip above his ballooning trunks; his hose,
a little rumpled now, was of black silk; the canions of his boots, of
fine Cordovan leather, had slipped down, one to the level of his knee,
the other to his very ankle. He sat down again to pull them off, first
one and then the other, emptied out the water by which they were
logged and drew them on again. He removed from his neck the handsome
collar of Dutch point, which hung like a dish-clout now that the sea
had washed all the starch from it. He wrung it out, considered it a
moment, then cast it from him in disgust.
Giving now in the full daylight a closer attention to his
surroundings, he was startled to perceive the real nature of certain
dark objects which dotted the little strip of beach. These, carelessly
observed when he had first looked about him whilst the light was dim,
he had assumed to be rocks or clumps of seaweed.
He made his way towards the nearest of them with dragging feet. He
paused to bend over it, recognizing it for the body of Hurtado, one of
the officers of the ill-fated galleon, a gallant, stout-hearted fellow
who had laughed at perils and discomforts. Hurtado would laugh no
more. Don Pedro fetched a sigh that was in itself a requiem, and
passed on. A little farther, he came upon a man still bestriding in
death the spar upon which he had ridden ashore. Seven other bodies
lay, some sprawled, some huddled, upon the sands where the sea had
cast them up. These, some timbers, a chest, and few odd furnishings
represented all that was left above water of the splendid Concepción.
Don Pedro considered his late comrades with that solemnity which the
dead must ever command. He breathed a prayer for them even. But upon
his finely chiselled face--of the colour of ivory, its warm pallor
stressed perhaps by the small black moustache and stiletto
beard--there was no shade of regret for their fate. Don Pedro was
equipped with a finely balanced, cold intelligence which could
suppress emotion in the weighing of realities. These men were more
fortunate than himself in that they had died but once, whereas he was
destined, he supposed, to endure another and infinitely more cruel
death in this hostile land.
It was a reasoned assumption, and by no means merely the apprehension
of illogical panic. He was acquainted with the fierce hatred of Spain
and Spaniards that was alive in England. He had seen flashes of it
during his sojourn at Elizabeth’s Court, where he had spent two years
in the train of his cousin, the Ambassador Mendoza--he who had been
compelled to leave England when Throgmorton betrayed his complicity
with the adherents of the Queen of Scots in a plot against the life of
Elizabeth. If that hatred had been so lively then, what must it be
to-day after years of alarms culminating in the dread into which the
coming of the Armada had flung this God-abandoned country? He knew his
own feelings for a heretic; he knew how he would deal with one at
home; how, indeed, he had dealt with some. Was he not a lay tertiary
of Saint Dominic? These feelings supplied him with a standard by which
to measure the disposition of heretics towards himself, and the fate
that must inevitably await him at the hands of heretics.
He paced back slowly to Hurtado’s body. He remembered to have observed
that there was a rapier girt to it, and Don Pedro coveted the weapon.
This covetousness was entirely of instinct. Reason supervening as he
stooped to unbuckle the belt, he paused.
His sombre eyes looked out over the heaving waters as if to question
the Infinite of which the ocean must ever seem the symbol. What use to
him a sword?
Don Pedro was a cultured and learned gentleman who had studied at the
University of Saint James of Compostella, and afterwards applied his
learning in the world and the courts he had frequented. Hence he had
developed a habit of philosophic reflection. He had learnt that to
strive against the ultimately inevitable is a puerile effort, unworthy
of an intelligent mind. Where an evil is unavoidable, the wise man
goes to meet it and so makes a speedy end. Let him abide, then, here
in this deserted spot until he perished of hunger and of thirst; or,
if he went forward, let him cover his face like a Roman and receive
death from the first hand raised against him.
Thus philosophy. But Don Pedro was still young; the blood flowed
strongly in his veins, and the love of life was quick within him.
Philosophy, after all, is an arid business, concerned with
speculations upon the why and wherefore of things, with theories upon
past and future, upon origin and destination outside of absolute human
ken. Life, on the other hand, as apprehended by the senses, is
concerned with the moment; it is not vague, but definite, real, and
self-assertive. Where life flows strongly, the reality of what is must
ever conquer speculations of what may be, and life will seize every
chance, however slender, of preserving itself.
He stooped again, and, completing this time his task without further
hesitation, buckled the dead man’s sword to his own loins. Nor was
this the end of the fortification he craved against the immediate
future. His men had all received their pay before the fleet sailed
from the Tagus, and there had been, alas, no chance of spending any of
it. The last precaution of each had been to strap his bag of ducats to
his waist. Don Pedro loathed the task, but went about it at the
dictates of common-sense, and in the end stuffed a heavy purse into
his sodden doublet.
By now the sun was already well above the horizon, and the last of the
storm clouds was dissolving in the blue. The sunshine and some
exertion which it had been necessary to employ had partly restored Don
Pedro’s circulation, had at least delivered him from the earlier ague
in which he had shivered. He became conscious that he was hungry and
thirsty and that his mouth was bitter as a brine pan.
He stood looking out to sea again, considering. Over the sunlit waters
a flock of gulls wheeled and circled ever nearer to the shore,
screaming shrilly. Whither should he direct his steps? Was it possible
that in this desolate land of England there might be folk so
charitable as to take pity on a fallen enemy in extremes? He doubted
it. But unless he went to ascertain, the few pains he had already
taken to provide for emergencies would be utterly wasted and a certain
and painfully slow death would await him here. After all, that was the
worst that could await him elsewhere, and it was not quite certain. A
chance undoubtedly existed. Thus, you perceive how the instinct of
life had come already to effect a change in his outlook, and to
irradiate it with a slight measure of hope.
He moved along that strip of Cornish beach, looking for some break in
the wall of cliff, for some path that should lead up to those green
heights on the level of which no doubt there would be men and
dwellings. He climbed a shallow wall of black and jagged rocks which
springing from the cliff ran athwart the sands to bury themselves in
the water and no doubt continue under it, just such a treacherous reef
as that upon which the Concepción had gone to pieces. In the tiny
cove beyond, he espied quite suddenly the debouching of a dingle adown
which a little brook came hurrying turbulently seaward. The sight of
it was blessed in his eyes; the voice of it sang a song of salvation
in his ears.
He reached the edge of it above the shore, flung himself prone upon
the sparse wet grass where the soil was still sandy, and gratefully
lowered his head to drink as drinks the animal. No Andalusian wine, no
muscadine, had ever tasted one half so sweet to him as this long
draught from that sparkling Cornish brook.
He drank avidly to quench his burning thirst and cleanse his mouth of
that bitter briny flavour. Then he washed the salt from his eyes and
beard and from the undulating black hair that grew to a peak in the
middle of his fine brow.
Refreshed, his spirits rose, and the reaction from the pessimism of
his awakening was complete. He was alive, and he was in the full glory
of his youth and strength. He had been wrong--impious and insensible
to God’s grace--to envy his poor dead comrades. Contritely he fell now
upon his knees, and did what it would have become a pious gentleman of
Spain to have done earlier: returned thanks to Heaven for his
miraculous preservation.
His orisons ended, he turned his back upon the sea and began the
ascent of the gently rising ground. The dingle was densely wooded, but
a beaten track where the way had been cleared ran along the brook with
its little cascades and deep pools, where here and there he beheld the
flash of the golden flank of a trout which his shadow startled. Tall
blackberry bushes tore at him as he advanced and thereby drew his
attention to their fruit. He was thankful for the discovery of this
manna, and proceeded to break his fast. It was very jejune fare; the
berries were small, none too ripe, and their pulp was scanty. But Don
Pedro was not fastidious that morning. Misfortune schools us in the
appreciation of small gifts. He ate with relish until a crackling
sound in the undergrowth across the stream disturbed him. He stood as
still as the trees that sheltered him, lest any movement on his part
should betray his presence. His ears were strained to listen and
identify the sounds.
Someone was moving yonder. He was not at all alarmed. It was not easy
to alarm Don Pedro. But he was alert and watchful, since whoever came
must of necessity be an enemy.
Quite suddenly this enemy was revealed, and not quite the enemy that
Don Pedro had looked for. Through the alders beyond the stream crashed
a great liver-coloured hound, snarling and growling as it came. It
stood poised a moment on the farther bank, now barking furiously at
this black intruder whom it had sighted. Then with short yelps it ran
hither and thither seeking a passage, and at last heaved itself across
in a terrific leap.
Don Pedro leaped at the same moment. Nimbly he sprang upon an
opportune rock, and out flashed Hurtado’s rapier. This infernal dog
should receive a cold, sharp welcome.
But even as the hound bounded forward to the assault, a clear,
imperious voice detained it.
‘Down, Brutus! Down! Hither to me! Hither at once!’
The dog checked, hesitating between indulgence and obedience. Then as
the command was repeated, and the mistress who uttered it appeared
between the trees, it turned, and with a final yelp, perhaps of
disappointed anger, went bounding back across the brook.