To the Indies Page 5

  A loud cry from a lookout brought everybody to their feet again. There was a canoe, a black speck under the glaring sun, full in sight as they rounded a headland. It was well out to sea, passage between cape and cape; they could see the flash of the paddles as the men bent to their work. With the wind right aft the squadron overhauled it fast; it turned frantically to make for the shore, but the Santa Ana was there, cutting it off, and it headed back. Fifty yards from the Holy Name the paddles ceased work, and the canoe drifted idly on the blue.

  Brown and naked, with streaming black hair, the Indians stared with frightened eyes at the huge hull drifting down upon them. One of them stood up, overcome with curiosity, in the desire to see better, revealing herself as a woman, quite naked save for her necklace. A loud roar of laughter burst from the ship — a naked woman was so rare a sight as naturally to excite laughter. She sat down abruptly, with hands over her face, and in her place a man rose to his feet, balancing precariously in the rocking canoe. He set an arrow to the string of the bow he held, raised the weapon and drew it to his breast, and loosed off the shaft.

  Rich saw the arrow in the air; it struck his breast-plate with a slight tap, and dropped on the deck with a faint clatter. It was an effort as feeble as a child’s — the shaft was already spent in it’s fifty yards’ flight by the time it reached him. His furred judicial robe would have been as effective protection as his steel breastplate. The arrow was merely a thin cane, crudely sharpened at one end, and with a single parrot’s feather at the other. But the gesture had excited the Spaniards. A crossbowman lifted his lumbering weapon to reply, and lowered it again at a hasty order from the Admiral.

  “Put that crossbow down!” he called, in his high tenor. “We are at peace with them. Hey, Diego, there, beat your tambourine, and you boys dance to it. Show them that we mean no harm.”

  It was a ludicrous scene, the ship’s boys capering on the forecastle, and the sullen Indians gazing up at them uncomprehending. The canoe was in the lee of the Holy Name now, and the wind was gradually drifting the big ship down upon it. The Admiral himself was up on the bulwark, jingling hawk’s-bells — hawk’s-bells had been found to be an unfailing attraction in the other Indian islands — and Alonso Perez was beside him, a red woolen cap in each hand held temptingly towards them.

  “Jorge,” muttered the Admiral out of the corner of his mouth to a seaman close at hand. “Strip off your coat and make ready to upset the canoe.”

  The canoe was close alongside as Jorge swung himself over the bulwark and dropped amid a wild scream from the Indians. The canoe overturned, and the occupants were flung into the sea. They were glad to clutch the ropes thrown to them and to be pulled on deck, where they stood, dripping water, with the Spaniards clustered round them. Four of them were men and two women, the women quite naked, but three of the men were wearing cloaks of coarse cotton about their shoulders — Rich examined the material. It was of poorer weave than any he had ever seen.

  “Make fast the canoe!” called the Admiral over the bulwark. “Put those paddles back in her!”

  The Indians made a frightened group, their arms about each other and their teeth chattering in fright, while the Spaniards pushed and elbowed to see more closely these strange humans, who felt no shame at nudity, who had never heard the name of God, who knew nothing of steel or gunpowder. Someone stretched out a hand and stroked a woman’s shoulder; she shrank from the touch at first, but when it was renewed she gradually recovered from her shyness and smiled a little over her shoulder at the man who caressed her, like a child; but a new bellow of laughter made her seek safety again beside her fellows.

  The Admiral pushed through the mob, resplendent in his scarlet velvet with his glittering helmet and armor; the Spaniards falling back to make room for him revealed him and his position of authority to the Indians. He was uttering strange words learned in Cuba and Española, and they responded to his soothing tone of voice even though they clearly could not understand what he said.

  “Guanahin,” said the Admiral. “Cibao. Cuba. Hayti.”

  The names of these places meant nothing to them.

  “Canoa,” said the Admiral, pointing overside.

  That they understood; they nodded and smiled.

  “Canoa,” they said, in chorus, and one of them went on to say more, in a sing-song tone.

  It was the Admiral’s turn to shake his head.

  “Their speech is not unlike that of Española,” he said to Rich. “But it is not the same, save for a few words, like canoa.”

  “Canoa,” repeated one of the Indians, parrot-fashion.

  The Admiral jingled one of his hawk’s-bells enticingly, and they eyed it with wonder. He offered it, and they shrank back a little. He took the hand of one of the men, and put the bell into it, shutting his fingers over it, and then setting the bell a-rattle again by shaking the man’s fist. An awed expression crept over the man’s face as he realized that this bell was actually to be his. He could hardly credit his good fortune, cautiously opening his hand and finally jingling the bell delightedty. All the Indians were smiling broadly now.

  Rich’s eyes were on the necklace worn by the woman in the background. He stretched out his hand to examine it; she shrank away for a moment, and he tried to make soothing noises. But immediately she understood what he wanted, and stepped forward, proffering a loop of the necklace to him. He examined it closely. It was a string of pearls — two yards of pearls. The other Spaniards noticed what he was doing, and surged towards them, frightening her; a score of hands were stretched out for the necklace, when the Admiral turned fiercely upon them and they dropped back again.

  “They are pearls,” said the Admiral, after examination. He took one of the red woolen caps from Alonso Perez and offered it to her with a gesture of exchanging it for the necklace. She did not understand. He jingled a hawk’s-bell, and reached for the necklace again. Suddenly her expression changed to one of comprehension, and with two swift movements she uncoiled the necklace from her neck and thrust it, a great double handful, into his hands. Her puzzled look as he proffered the cap in exchange revealed that she had intended the necklace as a gift.

  “It is the same as in Española,” said the Admiral. “The heathen have no notion of barter. They think that because a stranger wants a thing that is sufficient reason for giving it.”

  The surging Spaniards round laughed at such folly.

  “She does not know what that cap is for, either, Your Excellency,” remarked someone in the background.

  “True,” said the Admiral.

  At his order Perez took off his helmet and the Admiral perched the cap on top of his mass of hair, stood back with a gesture of admiration, took the cap again and put it on the head of the trembling woman. The other Indians chattered at the sight, teeth flashing in smiles.

  “And look at this, Your Excellency. Look!” said a Spaniard, loudly.

  One of the Indian men had something hanging on a string round his neck, a little fleck of something with a yellow glint. It a tiny fragment of gold, smaller than half a castellano, but gold all the same. Rich heard the quick intake of breath all round the ring. Gold! The Admiral strode up, his expression so hard and fierce that the Indian raised his arm to ward off a blow.

  “Where did you get this?” demanded the Admiral.

  The Indian still cowered away, and the Admiral, with an obvious effort at self-control, changed his tone.

  “Send for Alamo from the Santa Ana,” he said, aside, and then, turning back to the Indian, he smiled winningly. He raised his eyebrows in an obvious question, pointed to the bit of gold, and then away to the island. The Indian thought for a moment, and pointed westward. There was a general murmur from the crowd — there was gold in the west.

  “Much?” asked the Admiral, making a gesture with wide-spread arms. “Much?”

  The Indian after a moment of puzzlement extended his arms in agreement, to the sound of a renewed murmur from the crowd. There was much gold to be found;
but Rich, watching the by-play, was not quite so sure. The Indian was clearly doubtful of the significance of the question asked him. He might be meaning that the gold was far away, or even, conceivably, that it was hard to come by. Years of sifting evidence had given Rich an insight into the extraordinary ways in which misunderstanding can arise.

  The Admiral was jingling another hawk’s-bell and offering to barter it for the gold, and the Indian made the exchange gladly as soon as he grasped what the Admiral wanted.

  “This piece of gold would buy five hundred hawk’s-bells,” commented the Admiral; he reached for another scarlet cap and set it on the Indian’s head, to the accompaniment of a renewed chorus of admiration from the others.

  “They like caps just as much as hawk’s-bells,” said the Admiral to Rich. “In that, they are more like the cannibal Indians of Dominica than those of Española. That is what one would expect.”

  The longboat, rowed as fast as a dozen stout arms could drive her, had returned now from the Santa Ana, and Alamo reported himself to the Admiral. He looked at the string of pearls which the Admiral gave him for inspection.

  “They are pearls undoubtedly,” he said, feeling their texture with his lips. He shaded them from the sun with his body to see their luster. “Yet they are different from the pearls of the Orient. Their tinge and luster are not the same.”

  “Are they valuable?” demanded the Admiral.

  “Oh yes. Half their value has disappeared because of the clumsy way in which they have been bored, but I would give you a good price for them in the Calle del Paradis. As rarities, even if for no other reason, they would stand high. And there are some good specimens here, too. These two match well and are of superb luster. A queen could have no better ear-drops.”

  “And what of this gold?”

  Alamo took the fragment of metal, poised it on a finger tip, tested it against his teeth, turned it to obtain a flash of the sun from it.

  “That is gold,” he said. “Without my acids and scales I cannot assay it, but I am certain it is pure and virgin. It contains no base metal, in other words, and it is in a state of nature, as it was found.”

  “And where would that be?”

  Alamo shrugged.

  “In the bed of a stream, most likely. Or in sand or loam close to a stream. Gold found in the heart of a rock is never in pieces as large as this.”

  “Thank you. Now speak to these men in the tongues of the East.”

  Alamo addressed the Indians in a language of which Rich understood no word. Nor did the Indians, to judge by the blankness of their expressions. Alamo tried again, this time in the Arabic with which Rich was faintly familiar, but without result. He spoke to them in Greek, of which Rich had a working knowledge, and then again in a language faintly reminiscent of Arabic to Rich. The Indians’ faces remained impassive.

  “That is Hebrew, Greek, the Arabic of the East and the Arabic of the West, Your Excellency,” said Alamo.

  “Thank you. We can let them go now,” said the Admiral.

  He took more caps, and set one on the head of each Indian. He pressed a hawk’s-bell into each of their hands, and then he waved them over the side to where their canoe, gunwale-deep, floated at the end of a line.

  “Go in peace,” he said, as they still stood awestruck at the magnificence of the presents pressed upon them. He drew one by the wrist to the ship’s side to make his meaning plain. They slid down the line into the waterlogged canoe; one of the women took hold of a big shell tied to the gunwale and with it began to scoop the water swiftly out — it was obvious that they were perfectly accustomed to having their cranky craft capsized. The line was cast off, and the men took the paddles. Slowly the canoe stood away from the ship, heading in for the land. The scarlet caps danced over the water, bright in the light of the setting sun. The Indians never looked back; Rich, watching their course, saw the canoe turn abruptly aside in fright, like a shying horse, from the caravels as the big sails were trimmed to the wind again.

  “With kind treatment and presents,” said the Admiral, coming to stand beside Rich, “we can hope that they will tell their fellows and send them to us. We need pearls and we need gold.”

  Not merely for any mad scheme for reconquering the Holy Land either, thought Rich. He knew how precarious was the Admiral’s hold on the royal favor, despite the presence of his two sons — one of them a bastard, too — as pages at court.

  “We have made a start,” he said, cheerfully.

  “So we have,” said the Admiral; in his two fists was the long string of pearls, luminous in the failing light.

  Chapter 5

  In the lavender dawn next morning, when the ships had hardly gathered way after lying-to all night, the lookout cried that he saw more land. It was a low peak on their port bow; to starboard the southern coast of the island of Trinidad terminated in a similar peak, with a narrow strait between, towards which the easterly breeze was briskly pushing them. The Admiral came with his limping step to see for himself. He gave two hurried orders, hailing the caravels himself, in his high voice, as they converged upon the Holy Name towards the strait. Rich did not understand at the time all that happened next. He saw the anchors let go and the sails got in, and the longboat manned to go up the strait and take soundings, but before the boat could cast off the sailors in the ships were running and shouting with excitement. The anchors were not holding on the rocky bottom, there was a fierce current running here of which they could have no knowledge until they tried to stop, and the wind was still pushing briskly against hulls and rigging. Stern first, and with anchors dragging helplessly, the ships were moving fast towards the unknown passage — a fact which Rich found it hard to realize at the time, and of the danger of it all he was quite unconscious.

  He saw the Santa Ana lurch as her anchor caught, saw her cable part, and saw her swing round and race them on their course toward the strait. The rocks to the right, all a-boil with surf, seemed to be coming nearer, dangerously near. The Admiral was shouting orders; Osorio was running forward with an axe, and the Admiral himself was hounding the panicky sailors up the shrouds. The cable was cut, the mainsail dropped. High and clear the Admiral’s voice called to the steersman. Over went the tiller. For a few more harrowing seconds the ship, nearly aback, hesitated; they could hear the surf on the rocks. Then slowly she turned and gathered way. She lurched in a sudden boil of current, and a moment after she was running free, as if nothing had happened at all, on a sea mirror-smooth, with the rocks far astern and the land already far distant on either hand.

  The Admiral was smiling as he returned from setting the men to work at preparing the spare anchor and cable.

  “Sailors are ignorant and superstitious,” he said, limping up to Rich. “On seas where no Christian has ever sailed before, I suppose it is excusable. When they found that anchors did not hold and that we were in the grip of a current they imagined all sorts of things. They thought we were near Sinbad’s loadstone mountain, being dragged by the attraction of our iron. Or they thought we had reached the edge of the world and were about to slide off. They thought of everything, in fact, except the need for getting the ship under control again.”

  “You thought of that, Your Excellency,” said Rich. The incident confirmed what he knew well enough already, that the Admiral was a first-rate seaman with a clear head for any emergency.

  “That is thanks to the Blessed Virgin,” said the Admiral simply and devoutly. “She has never deserted me. Not even in worse perils than that. But that was a strange current between those islands.”

  He shaded his eyes from the sun and looked back at the perilous passage.

  “So it appears,” said Rich.

  “The caravels are safe. They were nearer the center of the strait. It was well that we hove-to last night,” commented the Admiral, half to himself. “I shall call the new land the Isle of Grace. And the strait must have a name, too, for my chart: the Serpent’s Mouth!”

  “Your Excellency is ingenious at de
vising names. But of course you have had much practice.”

  The Admiral flushed a little at the compliment. He smiled confidentially, and made a deprecating gesture with his hand; the smile almost became a grin.