‘Get you hence, Ocampo, holy martyrs are directed to Christ by God and their consciences, not by your distant abjurations.’
‘Damn you, Don Juan!’
‘Give these men,’ the tall and immobile figure on the poop thundered, ‘comfort with thy blessing or prove a false priest!’
The remark was met by an immediate and acquiescent kneeling of Marmolejo and his colleagues and Ocampo knew that he had been cunningly cornered.
‘May it please Almighty God that a ship so loaded with evil things and great sins make her voyage according to Thy mighty will!’
And with a smile of triumph at the ambiguity inherent in Ocampo’s benediction, Guillestigui joined the fervent chorus: ‘Amen!’
This had hardly subsided, however, before the captain-general was insisting that Ocampo leave the Santa Margarita immediately. Pointing to Ocampo’s private effects of a chest and bed-bundle he said, ‘That is one less encumbrance. Now, before I have that chest full of idolatrous claptrap thrown overboard, get down into Don Felipe’s barge.’
As Ocampo, mustering all the dignity at his command, rose and threw the frock of his habit over the rail, Iago smothered a smile, for Guillestigui, if not the apostate Olivera thought him, spoke like a Protestant. With one final glare at the captain-general, the wretched priest had gone. Followed by his adherents and watched by the Franciscans left aboard the não, Ocampo was pulled away in the boat which flew the standard of Don Felipe Corço.
‘That is one less cuckoo in the nest.’
Iago looked round and found Ximenez at his side. ‘Aye, but we remain overloaded.’
‘How stands the wind?’ Guillestigui’s voice, invested with new authority, boomed out over the ship.
‘Fair, Excellency, from the south-eastward, and we are hove short.’
‘Then let us break out the anchor and make sail!’
An hour later, to the boom of a pair of sakers, the Santa Margarita stood out clear of Cavite and once again headed again for the island of Corregidor followed by the admiral’s ship, the obedient San Geronimo.
Although, as a sobrasaliente, Don Iago might claim some sort of right to dine at Guillestigui’s table, he was not one to insist upon it and that evening the captain-general did not renew the invitation so abruptly curtailed the day before. Iago wondered how Alacanadre, having been among those who had defended Ocampo with a drawn sword, would be regarded by the captain-general. Perhaps even then Guillestigui was consulting his henchmen, or upbraiding the master-of-camp. In one respect Iago remained detached from his Spanish colleagues, despite his formative years having been spent in their midst: he was less impetuous and cooler in his thinking. He would have been more circumspect before drawing a sword, for the act was – for the disguised Jacob van Salingen – an act of irrevocable intent. That Alacanadre had drawn his blade against his commander would be set aside even by Guillestigui, he realized after some reflection, by the fact that it had been in defence of a priest.
The sun set two hours after leaving Cavite, but it was a fine night and it seemed as though the removal of Ocampo, far from inviting God’s wrath upon the ship and her company, had instead called forth His blessing. The denizens of the half-deck messed together in what, in a less encumbered vessel, would have been a tolerably clear space in the centre of the tween-deck in which they had erected their makeshift accommodation. Nevertheless they, or more accurately their servants, had drawn together the most substantial chests and made a table round which bales formed a species of seats. Here sat Iago, Don and Doña Arrocheros, a number of the minor officers and soldiers, among them Don Gonzalo Ordóñez and Capitán Gonzalo Manuel. At Don Baldivieso de Arrocheros’ insistence the remaining Franciscans were invited to join them, and Iago sat between Ordóñez and his earlier acquaintance, Fray Mateo Marmolejo who introduced him to the others of his Order: Fray Hernando, Fray Agustin (said to have been chaplain to the Bishop of Manila), the bishop’s nephew and his cousin.
Arrocheros, who had assumed the dignity of mess president, perhaps because he alone could bring a pretty, if gravid, woman to the extemporized table, had his servants produce wine. Thus fortified all indulged in a forced heartiness that was a product of the events of the previous thirty or so hours.
Nevertheless beneath the swinging oil lamps which threw shadows across the table as the ship worked in the gentle seaway, the meal of roast capon and rice was not without its conviviality, or its revelations. At first no one wished to refer to the departure of Ocampo, but the wine loosened tongues and Arrocheros, a wealthy man who brooked little in the way of interference from others, grew outspoken.
‘Perhaps the Reverend Father was correct in this matter of overloading. Certainly our recent experience persuaded me that the ship seemed difficult to handle when in a strong wind. You, Don Iago, would not have gone aloft with such alacrity unless you too entertained some such apprehension. Is that not so?’
Iago felt the attention of the diners focus upon himself. ‘The men are inexperienced,’ he temporized, ‘not used to working a new ship together. It is not unusual . . .’
‘But you told me that you thought the ship overloaded and unstable,’ pressed Marmolejo.
‘That is true,’ Iago admitted, ‘but I have no desire to cause further anxiety to Doña Catalina,’ he added, grasping at a straw. ‘Besides, it would be proper to say that her stability is diminished by overloading, not that she is in imminent danger of capsize.’
‘But the conditions to induce it are possible?’ asked Arrocheros.
‘Well . . . yes, that too is true to some extent.’
‘I have no desire to sail in an endangered ship, Don Iago,’ put in Doña Catalina, her face full of alarm.
‘Perhaps then, señora, you should ask your husband to petition the captain-general.’
‘He would not listen,’ said Fray Hernando, speaking for the first time.
‘Why, what manner of man is he?’
‘A strong man,’ Hernando said, though it was clear several around the table thought any discussion of the character of the captain-general was dangerous. ‘A soldier who distinguished himself in the wars against the Indians in New Spain.’
‘Gunpowder against arrows, Fray Hernando,’ laughed Ordóñez, ‘scarcely makes an Alava.’
‘Have a care, Don Gonzalo,’ advised Marmolejo, ‘might is apt to be right, especially within the confines of our little wooden world.’
Ordóñez smiled to himself and then, turning to his neighbour, Iago, muttered, ‘Guillestigui is stiff with ambition, which this commission will satisfy if it pays him what he calculates.’
‘He seeks to rise high in this world?’ Iago asked quietly as the conversation became general and each man turned to his left or right.
‘Oh yes, and thinks little of the next. Greed and desire will ensnare him if his sins be discovered.’ Ordóñez paused, then went on, ‘But how often have you known the wicked perish and the virtuous triumph, eh? Not often, I’m thinking. Would that the priests were right sooner; unfortunately they promise judgement after death.’
‘Perhaps that is the sublimest justice,’ Iago said guardedly, regarding the confiding Ordóñez with some interest, ‘and we should not expect that of man to be anything other than corrupt.’
Ordóñez, his face briefly and vividly illuminated by the lanterns, was wrapped in a cynical smile. In the following shadow the grimace stayed in Iago’s mind’s eye. He responded with casual elegance. ‘The world is more corrupted by those who mistake their good fortune for the reward of virtue, Don Iago. Therein lies the true dilemma of mankind.’
In the night that followed, as Iago tossed uncomfortably upon his bedding, he was haunted by Ordóñez’s words. Whether or not the world’s apparently random inequities constituted humanity’s ‘true dilemma’ seemed indeterminable; that mankind tolerated the manifold abuses that so often contributed to such inequities seemed a more pressing matter.
And this consideration had a bearing upon the material sta
te of the Santa Margarita, for she was sluggish in her rolling and, as she cleared Manila Bay and turned south in the light of the dawn, Iago fell into a fitful sleep, dreaming not about the rape of Zierikzee, but of the safety of the great ship.
Five
The Embocadero
In the days that followed there were those among the three hundred souls on board the Santa Margarita who jeered at Ocampo’s curse. Chief among these was the captain-general, whose Basque following increasingly dominated the ship, and although opinion was divided among the many passengers – and in the case of Don Baldivieso and his wife between spouses – the ship’s company largely manifested the indifference of sailors when the weather favoured their ship’s passage. Besides, dismissing all thoughts of Ocampo made the resumption of their wicked ‘concubinage’ easier.
Feelings were otherwise among the priests and the nuns who began to emerge from their prayerful hiding to take the sunlit air. Led by Marmolejo, Hernando and Agustin, and supported by several of the passengers bound to the Church by devotion, they continued to see the conduct of Guillestigui and his officers as the posturings of the vain; a manifestation of secular conceits against which they must maintain a bulwark of prayer. For them the need to plead their cause before God and to invoke Ocampo’s dispensation for the success of the voyage was paramount, notwithstanding the fate of Guillestigui himself.
And while the sailors began to enjoy the passage through the islands, pleased that the removal of Ocampo seemed to have improved their prospects, the passengers were increasingly aware of the vast distance they had committed themselves to travelling. Although all of them, except the young born in the Philippines, had come west by sea from New Spain, time had eroded the memory of their earlier voyage. The passage ahead of them had been put out of mind by the fussy preoccupations of departure, but now many of the passengers found that even the coasting voyage along the southern littoral of Luzon to reach the narrows of the Embocadero seemed an endless and tedious traverse.
The winds were frequently fitful and occasionally contrary; sometimes the Santa Margarita beat back and forth a whole day in sight of the same prominent feature, a peak like the Loro de Pico, a hillside, a headland; or they lay becalmed off a village watching the smoke from its cooking fires rise in a steady and frustrating column. While the religious, now openly guyed as ‘the Holy Ones’, worried about their slow progress, the seamen – though often called to raise tacks and sheets and man the braces as the Santa Margarita and the San Geronimo beat wearily to the eastward – nevertheless enjoyed what for them was an easy labour. And while Guillestigui, his staff and the military officers wined and dined, consuming the fresh produce with a hearty abandon, Lorenzo and the wiry Olivera worried as only true sea-officers knew how.
Most of the time the two great ships made fair progress and the majority on board, pressed closely within the irksome confines of the ship, spent those first days under way adjusting to their new life. With the exception of the extreme camps of the captain-general’s exalted cronies and the Holy Ones, which were each of their nature exclusive, the growth of factions was subtle and imperceptible. The preoccupations of daily life, with its myriad demands, inconveniences and downright irritations, along with the smooth running of the ship as she made her steady passage, produced no obvious need for men and women to take sides. The Holy Ones were an isolated minority, to be laughed at in the sunny, windless days, the captain-general’s staff no different from Spanish colonial nobility throughout Rey Felipe’s immense imperial dominions. Characteristically, each group kept itself to itself and, apart from an evening promenade that took the place of the customary paseo ashore, they did not interfere in the management of the ship, leaving such tedious labours to the pilots and their under-officers.
There was, however, plenty to squabble over in so overcrowded and mismatched a population. During daylight hours the ship buzzed with the noise of men and women, many with insufficient to occupy them fully, deprived of sundry necessaries and bound to conform to the rigid disciplines and routines of the ship. These people found the only outlet for their petty frustrations to be a voluble explosion of their woes, real and imagined. The physical fights that sometimes broke out were quickly put down by Llerena and his underlings, though occasionally, if the altercation involved two of the seamen’s women, the pair would be allowed to claw at each other until intervention came from the officers or blood had been drawn. Such dispensations were within Llerena’s gift and had a lancing effect on the more ugly moods that developed between decks.
While these arguments flared into spats and rows, there were those few people whose sense of humour or sheer good-natured commonsense soon mollified wounded pride, or settled some silly dispute over who put what where or whose turn it was to assume some duty they shared out in common. In this social confusion, Iago’s small household proved itself a model and he himself, along with Don Gonzalo Ordóñez, and Fray Marmolejo of the Holy Ones, became the arbiters of petty squabbles between decks, assuming a magisterial role.
Iago himself was enchanted with the beauty of the passing coastline: green and rolling jungle covered the islets and islands between which the deep blue of a hundred straits opened up invitingly. He was charmed too by the changing light, the nacreous early morning mists which lingered in the narrow valleys, the cool rosy dawns, the brilliance of noon and the blazing sunsets. His seaman’s instinct led him to maintain a rigid personal routine, in emulation of the ship’s, thus maintaining a diurnal rhythm which minimized all but the most intrusive irritations of his fellow passengers. He took to walking daily in the waist with Ximenez and Ah Fong, initially so that he could enjoy the company of the latter without drawing undue suspicion as to her true status. In this charade the girl and the dwarf masqueraded as equals and he must needs keep both close company; Ximenez proved a witty and agreeable companion while both he and Ah Fong seemed to have struck up a friendship that conversed in a mixture of Spanish, Cantonese and the Portuguese-based pidgin of the Pearl River. Ah Fong he already knew for a clever woman; now Ximenez demonstrated his own intelligence.
In the seclusion of their private area, secured from prying eyes by the coconut matting and canvas that passed for bulkheads in that crowded space, quiet conversations were possible, but Iago was scrupulous in maintaining the fiction of Ah Fong’s sex and the girl, her small breasts tightly bound, skilfully dissembled by the judicious use of a bucket. She was also clever in her abuse of the basic cosmetics available to her, her skin losing its soft, feminine glow under applications of soot, while lamp-black rubbed into her hands gave her an appearance identical to the ship’s own boys.
The example of his master and the Chinese girl led Ximenez into an easy and pleasant routine. In his less busy moments he blessed his good fortune in stumbling upon the stranger who had come ashore at Cavite only a few weeks earlier. Optimism rode high in the dwarf’s heart, for Don Iago treated him like a man, and others aboard, in awe of his taciturn master, adopted a pretence of doing the same. Ximenez knew they were playing him false, but he was content in their acquiescence. Besides, Ximenez also knew that Don Iago was not what he pretended to be. The secret bound the dwarf to his master closer than the latter ever knew.
Despite these careful arrangements, however, Iago and his two faithful companions were not unaffected by the difficulties set before them by the conduct of the captain-general. Once the Santa Margarita had cleared the great bight of Manila Bay and stood south and then south-eastwards through the Verde Island Passage, Guillestigui and his senior officers, who had hitherto exercised upon the long poop, had taken to the half-deck and appropriated it for their own use. Here they paced up and down of an evening before dining, the handful of women in their company brought out from the recesses of the aftercastle in out-moded finery to figure the traditional paseo. While Guillestigui and his coterie tolerated the occasional use of the half-deck by others, allowing the pregnant Doña Catalina to promenade there with her husband, there was a growing antipath
y to anyone else making free of the deck. Iago was himself one of the exceptions.
Thus two-thirds of the Santa Margarita’s upper deck, cluttered though it was with the officers’ private cargo, was effectively banned to some two hundred and sixty people, unless they appeared there for some nautical purpose. This mass of mixed humanity was obliged to make the best of the waist, equally encumbered with cases and bales, not to mention the cages of the fowls and several lactating nanny-goats. Even this limited space was denied them when the ship was manoeuvring, going about at the end of each tack as she closed with the land. Thus the passengers were, for the most part, confined in the inadequate space below decks, a harsh repression to people used to free and daily movement. It took a week or two for the true inconvenience to impinge upon the consciousness of most, who were just recovering from seasickness, and a day or so more for it to assume the status of an injustice, but its enervating effects were inexorable, subtly driving people into a sullen resentment towards the captain-general and his indolent party.
There had been a half-hearted attempt to strike some of the baggage and extra cargo below and it had met with a little success, enough to convince Guillestigui that further animadversion against the overloading and potential instability of the vessel was unjustified. The nature of the Santa Margarita’s precious lading came as no surprise to Iago, whose time on the Chinese coast had taught him a great deal about the exports made to the Spanish Philippines in exchange for silver – great heaps of silver – from the mines of Zacatecas and Potosí on the far side of the great ocean. Deep in the Santa Margarita’s hold were cases upon cases of porcelain, lacquerware, jade and ivory carvings, many fashioned according to the demand into images of Christian saints. These curious artefacts would persuade the papacy that perhaps a form of Christianity existed in distant Cathay. Forced in above the stow of the heavy cases containing these products were bales and bales of precious silks, double-wrapped in matting, compressed to fill the space to its uttermost capacity, some even occupying that properly reserved for the consumable stores, such as rice, salted meat and dried pulses. Nor was China the only source of their cargo. Camphor and gemstones came from Borneo; more jewels – chiefly rubies and sapphires – were brought from Siam, together with musk, ebony and elephant ivory. And the ship also bore spices, carried to the Philippines from the Moluccas. Cinnamon and cloves, but chiefly nutmegs in burlap sacks, gave off their subtle aroma and, in sweetening the ship, made tolerable what would otherwise have been a stinking environment for the Santa Margarita’s company. All in all it amounted to an immensity of treasure: a Viceroy’s dream some called it and, for a man of Guillestigui’s stamp, it almost surpassed the most extravagant desire. But, Iago reflected sombrely, a man in the throes of desire is incapable of rational thinking.
The Disastrous Voyage of the Santa Margarita Page 8