‘Why should you kill her?’
‘My son,’ said Agustin, crawling forward, ‘we were trying to save your soul and the soldiers brought the heathen child before you to persuade you to confess and declare your faith.’
‘Heathen child?’ Iago frowned, his intelligence awakening with the outrage he felt at the friar’s words. ‘You had her christened . . . Margarita.’
‘But my son, she remained a heathen at heart . . .’
But Iago was no longer listening. ‘I remember,’ he broke in, suddenly moving with the ferocity of the recollection and wincing with the pain of it. Ximenez drew back on his haunches, still crouching like a dog but turning his head towards the priest. ‘I remember,’ went on Iago, his voice distant. ‘You had her raped!’ His voice rose with the horror of it.
‘No, no! No, it was not I who ordered the men to violate her,’ Agustin said, trembling, ‘it was Olalde and Calcagorta who did that.’
‘But you knew that was what would happen,’ said Olivera, himself imagining the scene. ‘You deliberately collaborated and encouraged those bastards to goad the men to an outrage.’
‘She was a heathen child,’ Agustin said unctuously.
‘Did you not baptize her?’ Olivera asked, pressing Iago’s argument.
‘She was guilty of apostasy,’ Agustin replied.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Arrocheros saw her praying to her heathen gods. She was no more a Christian than the Indians here.’
‘You used her like dog’s meat,’ Ximenez said with a quiet menace.
Agustin looked at him, as though obliged to recognize the distasteful duty of acknowledging the dwarf’s part in this. ‘No,’ he said with an air of triumphant intellectual superiority, ‘it was you who treated her like meat . . .’
He got no further, for with a screech Ximenez sprang at Agustin’s throat, his powerful hands closing about the Franciscan’s scrawny neck, his thumbs pressed hard on his windpipe as they flailed together in the sandy dust.
It took Sancho and Olivera all their strength to prise Ximenez off Fray Agustin. As they struggled on the ground before him Iago tried to remember what had happened. Nearby the squatting Arrocheros laughed wildly.
A hundred yards away a group of half a dozen curious Chamorros turned away, talking quietly among themselves.
It was ten days later when they found the body of Agustin. Having confessed himself to Sancho he appeared to have expired alone on the beach during that night. No one knew precisely what had killed him, though he died with the marks of Ximenez’s thumbs imprinted upon his throat. Some said he had taken his own life, others that death had claimed his spirit naturally. No one knew his age and none of the survivors other than Sancho regretted his passing.
Although there were rumours of other Spaniards who had run or been taken to distant parts of Çarpana, there were now only five men left at Atetito. Iago had asked the fisherman if Olivera could come and live with them and the men had built a second hut to accommodate them all. To do this they had salvaged some timbers cast up along the shore from the Santa Margarita, which was now breaking up. Olivera came with the old woman, who still insisted upon looking after him. No one could explain why she had attached herself to him, but she seemed willing to skivvy for them all. Her presence gratified Ximenez once his conscience was eased by Iago’s forgiveness.
Iago said little beyond occasionally patting Ximenez upon the shoulder. He was increasingly given to long, withdrawn silences, but he uttered never a word of reproach to the dwarf and seemed content that Ximenez had saved the lovely Ah Fong from a prolonged defilement. It was a subject no one mentioned and Ximenez himself remained uncertain whether Iago truly understood exactly what had happened. In the days that followed they returned to the fisherman’s hut and picked up the threads of their lives, the Chamorros apparently tolerating this tiny rump of the crew of the great ship that was falling apart so conveniently upon their doorsteps.
Sancho was a diffident addition to the trio. As one of the Holy Ones, he had had little to do with Iago or Olivera, and his acquaintance with Ximenez during the voyage was distanced by sanctity and contempt. Nevertheless, he mustered a Christian forbearance of his new companions and, out of a genuine compassion, brought Arrocheros back into the fold.
At first he would not come and stuck to squatting outside the little compound but Sancho gently persuaded him first to eat and then to sleep with them so that gradually his mumblings grew less, his laughter less wild and on one memorable evening he leaned forward after they had eaten their meal around the fire and tapped Iago upon the shoulder.
‘I understand, Don Iago, that you lost your wife.’ Caught by the formality of the delivery and the remark itself, the look of poignant agony that crossed his master’s face made Ximenez almost mad with anger. The common embargo on the subject was not to be so rawly exposed by the mad Arrocheros. Ximenez looked quickly at Iago, who stared at Arrocheros with a curious, longing look that Ximenez had never seen before and could not interpret.
‘That is correct, Don Baldivieso,’ Iago said, after mastering the heavy pressure of emotion that Arrocheros’s words conjured up. Looking at the merchant he sensed a change in the lunatic, and nodded. ‘She was killed . . .’ Iago faltered a moment and then added, ‘as was yours, Don Baldivieso.’
‘Yes, Don Iago,’ Arrocheros said calmly, ‘so was mine. It is a misfortune that afflicts some men. A sad business, I dare say . . .’ And without explaining to which of the widowings he referred, Arrocheros stared sadly into the fire.
That evening was doubly memorable because it was also the eve of their rescue. Next morning they were about to attend to the day’s labours when they were aware of the shouts of a running group of Chamorros. A moment later Iago’s fisherman friend burst into their hut, gabbling the words that Iago understood to mean a great ship like the Santa Margarita.
The não had appeared off the southern coast and word had been passed north to Atetito. With bursting hearts the five survivors struggled south as fast as their legs could carry them, arriving on the shores of a shallow bay beyond which lay a ship as splendid as the Santa Margarita had once been. Drawn up upon the golden strand lay one of her boats and a group of Spanish gentlemen in morions and cuirasses, attended by seamen and surrounded by a large crown of Chamorros. At the appearance of the ragged survivors the Chamorros parted and, on the rim of the gathering, the five men stopped short and stared. An unnatural silence fell upon the crowd.
After all their hardships it seemed impossible that this day had come. Even Iago welcomed the sight of the dark, bearded faces and beyond them the flutter of the pendants and ensign of Imperial Spain.
One of the Spanish officers broke away and strode towards them. He wore thigh boots of red Morocco leather, red hose and doublet and breeches of black silk, slashed with dark purple. His blue steel cuirass was alive with Moorish decoration and a high curved morion shadowed his face from the burning sun. With a gentle tinkling of spurs and the faint noise of his sword belt and scabbard that protruded behind him like a peacock’s tail he scrunched through the sand towards them.
‘I am Don Rivera de Maldonado,’ he said, swinging half round and gesturing a gloved hand at the distant não, ‘commander of the Santo Tomas. And you?’
‘Antonio de Olivera, surviving pilot of the Santa Margarita, bound from Cavite towards Acapulco,’ Olivera declaimed, making his bow and introducing the others. ‘Don Iago Fernandez, a sobrasaliente; Fray Sancho of the Discalced Franciscans; Don Baldivieso de los Arrocheros, a merchant, and this is Ximenez, Don Iago’s servant.’
They bowed each in turn, including Ximenez, whose obeisance was greeted with a laugh. ‘We are back in civilization,’ he remarked to his master as they walked down to the Santo Tomas’s boat for passage out to the anchored ship.
‘God help us,’ replied the man men called Iago Fernandez.
They were regarded as old men aboard the Santo Tomas. Well treated and accommodated, they recov
ered such of their health as God returned to them. They said little about their ordeal to those among the Santo Tomas’s company who questioned them. A few rumours were started but these were quashed by Don Rivera de Maldonado, and for an account of the voyage most were willing to listen to the loquacious Sancho.
After they had returned to Manila, they learned how their consort the San Geronimo, which had abandoned them in the Embocadero, had had no more luck than the Santa Margarita. She too had been caught in the same extraordinary sequence of typhoons but had put back, only to be wrecked on the Philippine coast of Catanduanes. Later still, they heard how, the following year, the remaining survivors had been taken off Çarpana by the Jesus Maria, commanded by one Don Pedro de Acuña.
In after years, when Iago Fernandez and Arrocheros had gone into partnership and lived together in a house near the rice-market outside the Parian Gate of Intramuros Manila, they only occasionally referred to the events that had joined their lives, rarely remarking on the differences which had once lain between them, or how one had destroyed the happiness of the other. They absorbed themselves in a lucrative trade in silks, pearls and jade, and when they touched upon the shared ordeal of their younger years it was usually to bemoan the losses of thousands of reales’ worth of such merchandise that lay amid the limestone reefs of the distant island of Çarpana. Never did they touch upon that which each had truly lost.
If in festive mood, they would speculate on a fantastical voyage they would make in which they would employ the Chamorros to dive and bring up the treasures lying in the sand among the rotting timbers of the Santa Margarita. But the reminiscence cut too near to the bone to be pursued; it was an old man’s dream and as such, they sometimes wondered if it had ever really happened.
They had given their account of the voyage on oath to Maldonado, who acted as oidor and took down their depositions. To the surprise of all, the statement of Arrocheros was the most lucid. In giving it he seemed to have fully recovered his wits and it was as though every event had burned itself indelibly into his mind. In contrast, Olivera and Iago, having been so busy with the survival of the ship at the time, had trouble recollecting the precise sequence of events.
Ximenez was not asked, but he knew that the circumstances of Ah Fong’s death and his master’s ordeal had cast a long shadow over Iago’s memory and it was not in the faithful Ximenez’s interests to rummage in that dark repository. For his part the dwarf remembered everything as though it had occurred the previous day, but he kept his own counsel.
Olivera did not reach Manila, but died and was buried at sea, where he belonged. As for Sancho, it was he who having made a short statement to Maldonado, and satisfied the curious among the Santo Tomas’s crew, afterwards gave a fuller but less objective account to a fellow member of his order. Fray Juan Pobre faithfully recorded their conversations in a lurid but partial tale in which the evils of the apostate Guillestigui became the consequence of Ocampo’s curse and doomed all aboard the Santa Margarita except those redeemed by the Grace of Almighty God.
Little more was added by those rescued in 1602 by the Santo Tomas other than accounts of the horrors of oppression by the Chamorros of the Ladrones Islands. Sadly, by the time of their rescue little goodwill existed between the two racial groups and few elsewhere were interested in further details of the fate of the Santa Margarita.
As his master aged, Ximenez used to vet his papers, seeking out those involuntarily signed ‘Jacob van Salingen’ with a worrying persistence that suggested Iago sought some way back to his past. It was a thing that was never mentioned and Ximenez remembered on that first encounter how Iago had had trouble recalling the Spanish for elephant. It was at that moment the dwarf knew he was not Spanish. Only after Iago’s death did Ximenez raise the matter with Arrocheros, who admitted that he had long suspected his partner was no Spaniard. The revelation ensured that Ximenez transferred his loyalty to his master’s associate for the remainder of Arrocheros’s life. And for his part Arrocheros, having no other relative living in the Philippines, assigned the dwarf as his heir.
Ximenez survived them all, a richly dressed dwarf who dwelt outside the Parian Gate and dealt in silks, pearls and jade, and died one day on his knees before a small heathen shrine in red and gold and blue in which twined fierce gods and dragons. Those who discovered his body remembered the story of the Santa Margarita and said, with absolute certainty, that it had been part of the treasure carried aboard the ill-fated ship. Others thought so cheap a thing could never have been part of what was regarded as a cargo worthy of being a viceroy’s dream.
Hearing of the curiosity and of the reports insisting upon the corruption inherent in the images, the Archbishop of Manila ordered the thing to be sought out and destroyed. Afterwards the house was to be exorcized and the body of the dwarf burned.
Author’s Note
This novel is an imaginative reconstruction based upon what we know of the ill-fated and disastrous voyage of the Santa Margarita. Most of the characters, Guillestigui, Calcagorta, Olalde, the pilots Lorenzo and Olivera, the contramaestre Llerena, Arrocheros and others, actually existed and their characters as depicted conform to what was recorded at the time. The circumstances of Ocampo’s departure, the curse, the false start to the voyage and the lateness of the season all follow the sparse record, as do the train of events which subjected both the Santa Margarita and the San Geronimo to an extraordinary sequence of typhoons and storms.
What are here known, as they were known to the Spanish, as the Ladrones Islands, are today called the Northern Marianas. Çarpana, or Zapana, is now known as Rota. It is here that the remains of the great Philippine-built Spanish não still lie, having slipped from the reef and settled upon a softer bottom. At the time of writing the wreck is being excavated.
The Disastrous Voyage of the Santa Margarita Page 30