With an oath he flung his legs out of the hammock, instantly regretting his intemperate folly. Cold sea water tore at his bare feet as he searched for hose and boots, which he had stuffed into an angle of timbers under the deck beams above to keep them dry. The few lanterns that gave light on to the half-deck showed the huddled figures of his fellow passengers, many eyes bright and unsleepily vigilant where the candlelight was reflected off the swirling water, showing them like the pale ghosts they might soon become. Ah Fong and Ximenez sat close together, like one of the ivory statues they had in their hold; farther off Don Baldivieso and his wife had ceased their quarrelling and lay wrapped together in blankets, propped up against a lashed box so that their heads and chests remained above the sluicing sea water. Their half-lit faces and hollowed eyes were blurred and immobile masks of utter, helpless misery.
‘Where are you going?’ Arrocheros asked suspiciously, as if Iago’s absence further endangered them.
‘I shall be required at the pumps or on deck soon,’ he said.
‘Will this never end until we reach Acapulco, master?’ Ximenez asked.
‘We shall never reach Acapulco, you misbegotten idiot!’ snarled Arrocheros. ‘We need our Saviour Himself on board to still the surgings of this storm . . . those Holy Ones are of no use!’
Iago bent and touched Ximenez and Ah Fong. ‘Try and sleep,’ he said, ‘and whatever happens keep close to one another.’ Then, drawing his damp cloak about him, he left them. As he felt the extreme motion of the deck beneath his feet the notion of it needing a miracle to survive this battering seemed not unreasonable.
If there had been noise below it was as nothing to the cacophony on deck. Here was chaos itself, not Genesis but the hours before Genesis, for he could not breathe naturally!
As Iago turned his head this way and that he felt the effect of the wind in his lungs, at one moment filling, at the next evacuating them. It struck him that he would be drowned in this wet air, that it was neither water nor air but something from before Creation had separated the elements, before – he thought in a bleak and terrible moment – even God Himself! This was so great a heresy that he leaned back against the heavy door, pulled the skirt of his cloak about his face and with an effort mastered his breathing.
It was then that the miracle occurred. At least that is what he long afterwards swore, for it suited his circumstances. The idea was not divine and came not from God, but from his past among the Chinese seamen where he had heard them talk of the circularity of a taifun. Why he had not recalled it earlier he had no idea, though perhaps to that extent its now surfacing in his mind was a miracle; who knows? But recollection filled him with a sudden urgency. First he reached up and grasped a rope that disappeared up from its belaying pin into the shrieking and booming darkness of the night. At one moment it was taut as an iron bar, the next so slack that he could almost have taken another turn with it round the pin. This added evidence of the ship’s plight galvanized him and, fighting the wind by crawling, handhold to handhold, passing over some strange and softly resistant items and enduring successive soakings as water poured across the deck, he gradually found his way to the break of the poop. Here Lorenzo was lashed to a stanchion with two or three other figures whom in the gloom of the black night Iago could not then identify.
‘Don Juan!’
The officers of the watch seemed sunk in apathy or calenture. Bodies whose souls were preparing to depart them, irresolute men upon the abyss of death.
‘Don Juan!’
Above them the merest scrap of the lateen mizzen, a small, hard-reefed triangle of canvas as inflexible as a steel cuirass, combined with the high poop and the struggling helmsmen at the whipstaff below to keep the Santa Margarita head to sea. Remarkably they were successful, standing to their posts gallantly and keeping the wind close upon the ship’s starboard bow.
By every rule of seamanship the pilot-major and his stoic helmsmen had handled the great não with consummate skill. Now Lorenzo could do nothing more, indeed he knew of nothing more any man could do. He, like his men at the whipstaff, remained on duty exhausted.
‘Don Juan!’ Iago shook the arm of the inert figure; Lorenzo stirred.
‘Don Iago? Is it you? What is the hour? Not dawn yet?’ His weariness was palpable. ‘God help us, Don Iago, God help us . . .’
Iago’s mouth was dry as he lowered his cloak. He spoke with difficulty against the wind. ‘There is something you must know, Don Juan. Something I learned in China about these winds. Something that I had forgotten until now.’
There was a movement behind Lorenzo, other men heard his words and woke to full consciousness. Calcagorta loomed out of the shadows. ‘What rotten advice have you for us, Don Iago, that you recall it only now?’
Iago ignored the gunner, staring into Lorenzo’s face and shouting, though it sounded like a whisper: ‘These storms, these baguiosas, are circular. The wind blows round a centre wherein no wind stirs but all is irregular confusion. Hold the ship’s head to the wind and it will drive us inexorably into this . . . this . . .’ His tired brain could think of no suitable word to express the form of the centre.
But he had expressed the idea and Calcagorta seized it contemptuously. ‘And shall we all rise up to Heaven in this arsehole of the wind?’ he bellowed, his soldier’s mind employing the humour of both the battlefield and the gallows. And yet, it occurred to the weary Iago, the gunner had touched the essence of this storm’s central feature.
‘Aye, this windy fundament . . .’ Iago echoed, as if all was explained to Lorenzo by this apt metaphor.
‘I have never yet been sodomized at sea,’ yelled Llerena, leaning forward to add to the strange mixture of coarse incredulity and quasi-scientific exposition.
‘We must get the ship before the wind, Don Juan,’ Iago persisted.
‘But we could never manage it . . . the high poop . . . the heavy sea . . . we should broach, roll on our beam ends and founder . . .’
Iago shook his head vigorously. ‘It is our only chance. Once in the centre we shall be so violently used that our masts may be shaken out.’ He pointed to the main shrouds. ‘See where the standing rigging is already slack. More of that and we shall roll the masts out of her . . .’
‘All the more reason why we cannot venture a broach,’ roared Llerena.
‘The thing is impossible, Don Iago,’ added Lorenzo by way of confirmation.
‘There is less danger of a broach than in maintaining our present heading, Don Juan. See how the strength of the wind is such that the sea is flattened. Were it an ordinary gale with a heavy sea breaking I should agree with you, but if we pay her off the wind, though it will lay the ship down, it will not torture the shrouds and stays as it is doing so now!’
‘No! Do not listen to him, Don Juan,’ Calcagorta shouted. ‘He is a spy, a Portuguese spy!’
Iago was incredulous at this accusation and stared at the knot of sodden, wind-whipped officers before him.
‘See, he does not deny it,’ Calcagorta pressed his advantage.
‘Deny it? Of course I deny it, for the love of Christ! Even if I were a spy what reason . . . what purpose would be served by my wishing myself dead?’
For a moment more he stood before them, then seeing irresolution crystallize into resistance to his ideas, he turned away.
‘Get the Holy Ones on deck,’ Lorenzo said with a sudden firmness. ‘We must pray for our deliverance.’
Iago stood for a moment longer staring at the knot of terrified and exhausted men. Then he turned and slithered away from them to leeward, to crouch defeated in the scuppers. He fell among a soft warmth. Recollecting the strange items he had encountered when first coming on deck, he groped about him. He felt his bare hand nipped sharply and, above the roar of the elements heard the soft, defeated squealings of the dying seabirds, swept into this odd corner like dry leaves in a patio.
‘¡Dios!’ he muttered, horrified, yet unable to move as he squashed them beneath his exhausted body.
‘Lord God have mercy,’ he said and began to utter his own prayer as the crushed birds died spasmodically beneath him.
For six hours the Santa Margarita lay thus head to wind. The men fell idle at the pumps, the officers remained upon deck unrelieved but inactive, even the helm was lashed and abandoned. She demonstrated that a ship’s strength will, almost invariably, outlast that of her people and in so doing lulled them all into the feeling that nothing further could go wrong and that the prayers of the Holy Ones, assembled under the half-deck and joined by many of the passengers and some of the crew, had saved them from anything worse.
Upon the deck Calcagorta and Llerena grinned at each other and offered congratulations to Lorenzo. ‘Now all we have to do is wait, Don Juan, nothing lasts forever at sea . . .’
And the moment was graced by several of the captain-general’s suite appearing on deck, for the wind seemed to the optimistic among them to be easing. But Lorenzo was unmollified and shook his head; Olivera joined them and, upon hearing what had occurred, damned them for fools.
‘Don Iago may be right. The Chinese have been working these seas since the beginning of the world,’ he said vaguely.
‘And what in God’s name does that mean?’ Llerena asked savagely.
‘It means,’ Olivera said with the hauteur of a senior officer, ‘that you do not know everything, Diego de Llerena. Do you check the lashings on what remains of our deck cargo but don’t trouble your head about the handling of the ship.’
‘God damn you, you ape!’ roared a furious Llerena, moving towards Olivera.
‘Silence!’ commanded Lorenzo, stepping between the two men. ‘Get below, Llerena,’ he said turning to the boatswain, ‘you have stood on deck long enough.’
‘And to little account . . .’ Olivera added.
‘Enough, Antonio,’ Lorenzo snapped.
‘And what use are two pilots, eh?’ said Llerena contemptuously and turning away. ‘Come, Joanes,’ he said to Calcagorta, ‘let us leave these fools to shit the nest.’
And huddled in the lee scuppers, half hidden by the coils of wet rope hanging from the main pin-rails, Iago heard every word.
Towards the middle of the forenoon things changed for the worst. For some time the motion of the ship had become increasingly irregular but such was the exhaustion of all on board that no one appreciated this development until the note of the wind changed. Then, about an hour later, the wind abruptly dropped away with a suddenness that was dramatic in its impact upon the ship, for this was accompanied by two extraordinary phenomena.
Above them the cloud-wrack dissolved and a bright sky appeared.
‘’Tis the sky of Heaven,’ one wondering observer remarked as this revelation transformed the grey, spume-streaked sea into the deepest of blues. But herein lay no benign element but one which now ranged against them the most formidable enemy the Santa Margarita had yet faced. This was the centre of the typhoon, where the waves, generated from all points of the compass, ranged against each other. Few words can describe this confusion; the onward rush and collision of masses of moving water formed great rearing summits that fell as fast as they rose and into whose intervening valleys the Santa Margarita sank like a toy boat, before being raised up again. And this extraordinary convulsion was accompanied by a new noise, a great sucking and whooshing, a thunderous falling of masses of water upon wooden decks, a slopping and slapping sounding like the handclaps of gigantic fists. Nowhere on the face of the earth, and certainly not wherever they had seen bad weather at sea, did the surface of the ocean so resemble the upthrust and falling away described so eloquently by the psalmist. Such testamentary accuracy proved to the ever-vigilant Discalced Franciscans that the Bible contained the great truths of God’s revelation.
But the ship could not survive this wracking without damage, and Iago woke from his stupor to see the results of his own prophecy. Indeed it was the catastrophic tremor that woke him. The maintopmast and all above it went first, and in its falling tore down the foretopmast, damaged the main-yard lifts, broke the starboard bulwarks and took overboard most of the deck cargo stowed in the waist. Three seamen were caught in this torrent of goods, parted ropes, torn sails and heavy spars, and were carried overboard to their deaths.
No one lifted a finger to help them and it was some minutes before Olivera, summoning a reluctant and hostile Llerena, could muster seamen with axes to clear away the wreckage and disencumber the Santa Margarita of the dangerous spars that now battered her side like the rams of a dedicated enemy. While she lay thus supine her neglected helm chafed through its imperfect lashings and slammed from side to side, shearing a heavy iron bolt and significantly weakening the rudder hangings. This disaster was not known at the time for the ship continued to lurch and roll, to rise and to fall so that it was dangerous to stand, let alone to move about upon the deck. Indeed it proved almost impossible to cut away the raffle of the falling spars, for a man cannot swing an axe when holding on with one hand and when his gut is one moment in his throat and the next in his boots.
Such a task, insuperable at first glance, took an age to achieve and, as always with such work, was left by the timorous to a few intrepid spirits. Among these Iago laboured, incapable of inactivity when something – anything – could be done. Afterwards he confessed to his first moment of relief when he watched some of the deck cargo cascade overboard. But even when the last rope was severed, the lack of wind kept both ship and wreckage in close proximity, so that the hull was further hammered by the spars and it was not until the sun had set and the sky had grown overcast again that the wind finally separated them.
All now descended again into a hell of noise, for the wind came up as they passed out of the typhoon’s centre and once again they were driven into another night of misery and the wrath of God. It was only now that, finding the helm stiff and unresponsive, they realized the rudder had been damaged.
Eight
A Public Concubinage
The damage to the rudder was subtle. Mercifully it still seemed to work, though the force exerted by two men at the whipstaff with others tailing on to the relieving tackles, while sufficient to move the great tiller through a portion of its arc, was inadequate to fully control the ship. It seemed that there was a point beyond which the turning of the rudder required too great an effort and that sheer weight would be too much for the gear. Called below to the steering position by the quartermasters to see for himself, Lorenzo soon concluded that some part of the hinging gear which secured the rudder to the sternpost had either carried away or was distorted so as to inhibit the free swinging movement of the rudder.
On Lorenzo’s return to the upper deck, Olivera also went below to confirm the pilot-major’s findings. After a few minutes he reappeared on the rolling deck.
‘Well?’ Lorenzo asked, his voice raised above the howl and roaring boom of the wind.
‘I agree with you, Don Juan. I think it must be the upper pintle and gudgeon, or we should not be able to move the tiller at all. Something has carried away . . .’ He paused to think for a moment. ‘Probably the upper iron banding. But we can still steer, it is just that the helm cannot be put sufficiently far over to larboard for the ship to respond rapidly. We can only hold a lesser angle for longer and hope that the ship returns to her required heading. She will be sluggish, of course.’
Lorenzo nodded. ‘Devilishly sluggish. I only hope to God that she will return to her proper heading in time to avoid too often being flung back by another sea.’ Their eyes met. Lorenzo shrugged and then crossed himself. ‘We shall have to take our chance, at least until the weather moderates. There is nothing to be done in these conditions and even if we can get in under the tuck of the stern, I do not know what we can do.’
‘Perhaps we should put back, or find an island with a careenage,’ Olivera suggested.
Lorenzo shook his head. ‘We should be too much at risk in a careenage, besides the matter of resolving our problem would be risky. Better if we must to make for . . .’
His voice trailed off. With her upper spars gone the Santa Margarita might be run off before the wind but once the typhoon had passed that meant east across the whole expanse of the Pacific. Returning to Cavite was impossible.
‘Cipangu?’ Olivera suggested. Again their eyes met; both men recalled what had happened to the crew of the San Felipe four years earlier. Lorenzo shook his head and swore a blasphemous oath, but Olivera brightened. ‘The stock is a mighty timber,’ he reasoned. ‘The rudder is affected but is not disabled. The restriction can only be because the stock is prevented from rotating about its axis and thus, I submit, the distortion is working against the stock, which will abrade until it works itself clear. That we can move the rudder argues that this abrading contact is not great, that it will free itself without doing much material damage to the stock . . .’
Lorenzo, perceiving the hopeful argument of his colleague, began to nod. ‘I hope to Almighty God you are right,’ he said, crossing himself again. Olivera followed suit. ‘But drowning men grab at a straw, they say,’ said Lorenzo in a resigned tone.
‘Let me go below and encourage the helmsmen, and let me tell them to report any easing of the whipstaff and tiller.’
‘Very well.’ Lorenzo nodded, cheered a little by Olivera’s optimism.
Iago met the second pilot as he came below on his way to the steering position. Both men clung to a stanchion as the ship rolled and pitched, their voices raised above the terrible noise of the wind that made of the ship’s hull a sounding box for the elemental struggle outside, adding its own tone to the creaks and groans of the tortured hull as the Santa Margarita laboured through the heavy seas, along with the groans, cries, imprecations and wails of her distressed company. Olivera briefly informed Iago of their predicament. A moment later, as Olivera went on his way, Arrocheros, clinging from handhold to handhold, accosted Iago.
The Disastrous Voyage of the Santa Margarita Page 14