The Island of the Day Before

by Umberto Eco

  Resuming their westward course, descending below the twenty-fifth-degree latitude south, they replenished their water at an island of which the maps gave no indication. It offered no attractive features beyond its solitude, but the Knight—who could not bear the food on board and harbored a strong aversion to the captain—said to Roberto how beautiful it would be if a small band of good men, brave and reckless, would take possession of the ship, put the captain and any who wanted to stay with him in the longboat, burn the Amaryllis, and settle on that land, far from every known world, to build a new society. Roberto asked him if this was Escondida; the man shook his head sadly.

  Proceeding again northwest, abetted by the favoring Trades, they came upon a group of islands inhabited by savages with amber-colored skin, with whom they exchanged gifts, taking part in their merry festivities, animated by maidens who danced with the movements of the grasses that swayed on the beach almost at the water's edge. The Knight, who had taken no vow of chastity, on the pretext of drawing portraits of some of those creatures (and he was an artist of some skill), certainly had occasion to have carnal congress with them. The crew wanted to do the same, so the captain moved forward the ship's departure. The Knight hesitated about staying behind; spending his days sketching here seemed to him a splendid way to conclude his life. But then he decided this was not Escondida.

  Afterwards they again headed northwest and found an island with quite docile indigenes. In the two days and two nights they stayed there, the Knight of Malta took to telling stories: he told them in a dialect not even Roberto could understand, still less the natives, but the speaker assisted himself by drawing in the sand, and he gesticulated like an actor, stirring the enthusiasm of his audience, who hailed him with cries of "Tusitala, Tusitala!" To Roberto the Knight said how fine he thought it would be to end his days among those people, telling them all the myths of the universe. "But is this Escondida?" Roberto asked. The Knight shook his head.

  He died in the wreck, Roberto reflected on the Daphne, and perhaps I have found his Escondida, but I will never be able to narrate it to him, or to anyone else. Perhaps this is why Roberto wrote to his Lady. To survive, you must tell stories.

  The Knight's last fantasy was heard one evening, only a few days and no great distance from what would be the scene of the wreck. They were skirting an archipelago, which the captain had decided not to approach, inasmuch as Dr. Byrd seemed anxious to continue once again towards the Equator. In the course of the voyage it had been evident to Roberto that the captain's behavior was not that of the navigators he had heard of, who took careful note of all new lands, perfecting their maps, drawing cloud-shapes, tracing the line of shores, gathering native artifacts.... The Amaryllis proceeded as if she were the traveling lair of an alchemist bent only on his Opus Nigrum, indifferent to the great world opening before her.

  It was sunset, the play between clouds and sky against the shadow of the island drew on one side what looked like emerald fishes drifting over the peak. On the other there were crumpled balls of fire. Above, gray clouds. Immediately afterwards, as a fiery sun disappeared behind the island, a broad pink stripe was reflected on the clouds, bloodied along the lower fringe. After a few seconds the fire behind the island spread, looming over the ship. The sky was all a brazier with only a few cerulean threads. And then blood everywhere, as if some impenitents had been devoured by a school of sharks.

  "Perhaps it would be right to die now," the Knight of Malta said. "Are you not seized by the desire to hang from the mouth of a cannon and slide into the sea? It would be quick, and at that moment we would know everything...."

  "Yes, but at the instant we knew it, we would cease to know," Roberto said.

  And the ship continued its voyage, moving through sepia seas.

  The days flowed by, incommutable. As Mazarin had foreseen, Roberto could establish relations only with the gentlemen. The sailors were a gang of jailbirds: it was frightening to encounter one on deck at night. The passengers were starving, ill, praying. Byrd's three assistants never dared sit at his table, and they glided by silently, carrying out his orders. The captain might as well have been elsewhere: by evening he was drunk, and besides he spoke only Flemish.

  Byrd was a thin, dry Briton with a great head of red hair that could have served as a ship's lantern. Roberto, who tried to wash whenever he could, taking advantage of the rain to rinse his clothes, had never seen the doctor change his shirt in all these months of sailing. Luckily, even for a young man accustomed to the drawing rooms of Paris, the stink of a ship was such that the stink of one's fellows was no longer perceptible.

  A hearty drinker of beer Byrd was, and Roberto had learned to keep up with him, pretending to swallow while leaving the liquid in his glass always more or less at the same level. Byrd, it seemed, had been taught to fill only empty glasses. And since his own was empty always, he filled it, raising it for a toast. The Knight did not drink: he listened and asked an occasional question.

  Byrd spoke decent French, like every Englishman who in those days wanted to travel beyond his own island, and he had been captivated by Roberto's stories about the growing of grapes in the Monferrato region. Roberto listened politely to how beer was made in London. Then they talked about the sea. Roberto was making his first voyage, and Byrd seemed not to want to talk too much about navigation. The Knight asked questions only about the possible location of Escondida, but as Byrd could offer no clue, he received no reply.

  Since Byrd said he was making this voyage to study the flora, Roberto sounded him out on that subject. Byrd was not ignorant about botanical matters, and he could thus indulge in long explanations, which Roberto made a show of hearing with interest. At every landfall Byrd and his men actually collected plants, though not with the care of scholars who had undertaken the voyage for that purpose; still, many evenings were spent examining what they had gathered.

  During the first days Byrd tried to learn about Roberto's past, and the Knight's as well, as if he suspected them. Roberto gave the version agreed on in Paris: a Savoyard, he had fought at Casale on the side of the imperials, had got into trouble first in Turin, then in Paris, after a series of duels; he had had the misfortune of wounding a favorite of the Cardinal, and thus had chosen the Pacific solution to put much water between himself and his persecutors. The Knight narrated many stories; some took place in Venice, others in Ireland, still others in South America, but it was not clear which were his and which were not.

  Finally Roberto discovered that Byrd liked to talk about women. The young man invented furious loves with furious courtesans, and the doctor's eyes glistened as he vowed he would visit Paris one day. Then he recovered himself and observed that all papists were corrupt. Roberto pointed out that many Savoyards were practically Huguenots. The Knight made the sign of the Cross, and returned to the subject of women.

  Until the landing at Más Afuera, the doctor's life seemed to unfold at a steady pace, and if he took any readings on board, it was while the others were ashore. When the ship was under sail, he lingered on deck during the day, sat up with his table companions till the small hours, and certainly slept at night. His cramped lodging adjoined Roberto's, a pair of narrow cubicles separated by a partition, and Roberto lay awake to listen.

  But once they had entered the Pacific, Byrd's habits changed. After the call at Más Afuera, Roberto saw the doctor go off every morning from seven to eight, whereas before, they had fallen into the way of meeting at that hour for breakfast. Then throughout the period when the ship was heading north, until it reached the island of turtles, Byrd vanished at six in the morning. When the ship again turned its prow westwards, the doctor advanced his rising to five o'clock, when Roberto would hear an assistant come to wake him. Then by degrees the doctor took to rising at four, at three, at two.

  Roberto was able to check on him because he had brought along a little sand clock. At sunset, as if idly strolling, he would pass by the helmsman, where next to the compass floating in its whale-oil there
was a little stick on which the pilot, after taking the latest bearings, marked the position and the presumed time. Roberto took careful note, then went and turned over his hourglass, returning to repeat the operation when it seemed to him that the hour was about to end. And so, even lingering after supper, he could always calculate the hour with some assurance. In this way he became convinced that Byrd went off a little earlier each morning, and if he kept up that pace, one fine day he would rise at midnight.

  After what Roberto had learned from Mazarin and Colbert and his men, it did not take long to deduce that Byrd's disappearances corresponded to the successive passing of the meridians. So, then, it was as if someone sent a signal from Europe, every day at the noon of the Canaries or at some other fixed hour, which Byrd went off to receive. Knowing the hour on board the Amaryllis, Byrd was thus able to learn their longitude.

  It would have sufficed to follow Byrd as he slipped away. But that was not easy. When the doctor disappeared in the morning, it was impossible to follow him unobserved. When he began moving in the hours of darkness, Roberto could hear the man leave, but he could not go after him at once. So he waited a little, then tried to discover the path he had taken. But every effort proved futile. I refrain from mentioning the many times when, essaying a route in the dark, Roberto ended up among the hammocks of the crew, or stumbled over the pilgrims; but more and more often he would encounter someone who at that hour should have been asleep. So there were others keeping their eyes open.

  When Roberto met one of these spies, he would mention his usual insomnia and go up on deck, managing not to arouse suspicion. For some time he had earned himself the reputation of an eccentric who dreamed at night, wide-eyed, and spent the day with his eyes closed. But when he found himself on deck, although he could exchange a few words with the sailor on watch, if they could make themselves understood, the night was lost.

  So the months went by, Roberto was close to discovering the mystery of the Amaryllis, but had not yet found a way to stick his nose where he would have liked.

  In addition, from the beginning he had tried to extract some confidences from Byrd. And he thought up a method that even Mazarin had not been capable of suggesting to him. To satisfy his curiosities, during the day he asked questions of the Knight, who was unable to answer. Roberto emphasized that the things he was asking were of great importance if the Knight was truly determined to find Escondida. And thus, at evening, the Knight would repeat the questions to the doctor.

  One night on the bridge, they were looking at the stars, and the doctor remarked that it must be midnight. The Knight, prompted by Roberto a few hours earlier, said, "I wonder what time it is now in Malta."

  "That is easy," the words escaped the doctor. Then he corrected himself, "Or, rather, that is very difficult, my friend." The Knight was amazed to learn it could not be deduced from calculation of the meridians: "Does the sun not take an hour to cover fifteen degrees of meridian? So it would be enough to say that we are so many degrees from the Mediterranean, divide by fifteen then, and knowing our own time as we do, we would discover what time it is there."

  "You sound like one of those astronomers who have spent their lives poring over charts without ever navigating. Otherwise you would be aware that it is impossible to know on what meridian one is."

  Byrd answered more or less what Roberto already knew but the Knight did not. On this subject, however, Byrd proved loquacious: "Our ancestors thought they had an infallible method, based on the eclipses of the moon. You know what a lunar eclipse is: it is a moment when the sun, the earth, and the moon are on a single line, and the shadow of the earth falls on the face of the moon. Since it is possible to predict the day and exact hour of future eclipses, and it is enough to have at hand the Tables of Regiomontanus, you presume you know that a given eclipse should take place in Jerusalem at midnight, and you will observe it at ten o'clock. You will then know that you are at two hours' distance from Jerusalem and therefore your observation point is thirty degrees west of that city."

  "Perfect," Roberto said. "All praise to the ancients!"

  "Yes, but this calculation is not always accurate. The great Columbus, in the course of his second voyage, calculated by an eclipse while he lay at anchor off Hispaniola, and he made an error of twenty-three degrees west, that is to say a difference of an hour and a half! And on his fourth voyage, again relying on an eclipse, he erred by two hours and a half!"

  "Did he make a mistake or did Regiomontanus?" the Knight asked.

  "Who knows? On a ship, which moves constantly even when it is at anchor, it is always hard to take bearings correctly. You may also know that Columbus wanted to prove at all costs that he had reached Asia, and therefore his wish led him to err, to show he had gone much farther than he really had.... And lunar distances? They have been very fashionable over the last hundred years. The idea had—how shall I say—a certain wit. During its monthly course the moon makes a complete revolution from west to east against the sky of the stars, and therefore it is like the hand of a celestial clock that moves over the face of the Zodiac. The stars move through the sky from east to west at about fifteen degrees per hour, whereas during the same period the moon moves fourteen and a half degrees. So the moon, with respect to the stars, is off by half a degree each hour. Now the ancients thought that the distance between the moon and a fixed star, as it is called, was the same for any observer from any point on the earth. So it sufficed to know, thanks to the usual tables or ephemerides, and observing the sky with the astronomer's Cross—"

  "The staff?"

  "Exactly, with this 'Jacob's Cross' you calculate the distance of the moon from that star at a given hour on the meridian of departure, and you know that at the hour of observation at sea, in such and such a city it is a certain hour. But ... ah..." And Byrd paused, to enthrall his listeners even more. "There are the parallaxes, a highly complex matter I dare not explain to you. They are due to the difference of refraction of the celestial bodies at different altitudes above the horizon. Now with these parallaxes the distance found here would not be the same that our astronomers back in Europe would find."

  Roberto remembered having heard from Mazarin and Colbert something about parallaxes, and about that Monsieur Morin who thought he had found a way of calculating them. To test Byrd's knowledge, he asked if astronomers could not calculate parallaxes. Byrd replied that it was possible but extremely difficult, and the risk of error was very great. "And besides," he added, "I am but a layman and know little of these things."

  "So the only thing is to seek a surer method?" Roberto then ventured.

  "You know what your Vespucci said? He said: 'As for longitude, it is a very perplexing thing that few people understand, except those capable of sacrificing sleep to observe the conjunction of the moon and the planets.' And he said: 'It is for this determination of longitudes that I have often renounced sleep and have shortened my life by ten years....' A waste of time, I say. But look, the sky is overcast so let us hasten to our lodging, and end our talk."

  Some evenings later, Roberto asked the doctor to point out the Pole Star to him. The doctor smiled: from that hemisphere it could not be seen, and other fixed stars had to be used. "Another defeat for the seekers of longitudes," he remarked. "This way, they cannot fall back even on the variations of the magnetic needle."

  Then, at the urging of his friends, he broke again the bread of his learning.

  "The needle of the compass should always point north, and therefore in the direction of the Pole Star. And yet, except on the meridian of the Isla de Hierro, in all other places it shifts from true north, moving now east, now west according to the climes and the latitudes. If, for example, from the Canaries you move towards Gibraltar, as any sailor knows, the needle turns more than six degrees of a rhomb towards north-west, and from Malta to Tripoli there is a variation of two thirds of a rhomb to the left, and you well know that the rhomb is one fourth of a wind. Now these deviations, it has been said, follow set rules accordi
ng to the different longitudes. So with a good table of deviations you could know where you are. But..."

  "Another but?"

  "Yes, unfortunately. There are no good tables of the declinations of the magnetic needle. Those who attempted to make them all failed, and there are good reasons to suppose that the needle does not vary in a uniform way depending on the longitude. Furthermore, these variations are very slow, and at sea it is difficult to follow them, even when the ship is not pitching and thus disturbing the balance of the needle. Whoever trusts the needle is a madman."

  Another evening, at supper, the Knight, brooding on a few words Roberto had let fall with apparent nonchalance, said that perhaps Escondida was one of the Solomons, and he asked if they were close.

  Byrd shrugged. "The Solomon Islands! £a n'existe pas!"

  "Did not the English Francisco Drako reach them?" the Knight asked.

  "Nonsense! Drake discovered New Albion, in quite a different place."

  "The Spaniards at Casale spoke of it as something well known, and said they had been the discoverers," Roberto said.

  "It was that Mendaña who made the claim, some seventy years ago. But he said they lay between the seventh and eleventh degrees of latitude south. As if to say between Paris and London. But at what longitude? Queiros said that they were fifteen hundred leagues from Lima. Ridiculous. You could practically spit from the coast of Peru and hit them. Recently a Spaniard said that they lay seven thousand five hundred miles from that same Peru. Too far, perhaps. But be so kind as to look at these maps, some of them newly revised, though they but reproduce the older ones, as well as some offered to us as the latest discovery. You see? Some put the islands on the two-hundred-and-twelfth meridian, others on the two-hundred-and-twentieth, others on the two-hundred-and-thirtieth, not to mention those who imagine them on the hundred-and-eightieth. Even if one of these was right, others would err by as much as fifty degrees, which is more or less the distance between London and the lands of the Queen of Sheba."