Spice and the Devil's Cave

by Agnes Danforth Hewes

  SPICE AND THE DEVIL’S CAVE

  “The group in Abel Zakuto’s workshop hitched chairs closer to the table spread with a huge map”

  SPICE AND THE DEVIL’S CAVE

  AGNES DANFORTH HEWES

  ILLUSTRATED BY LYND WARD

  DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.

  MINEOLA, NEW YORK

  Bibliographical Note

  This Dover edition, first published by Dover Publications, Inc., in 2014, is an unabridged republication of the work originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, in 1930.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hewes, Agnes Danforth.

  Spice and the Devil’s Cave / Agnes Danforth Hewes ; illustrated by Lynd Ward.

  p. cm.

  “This Dover edition…is an unabridged republication of the work originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, in 1930”—Copyright page.

  Newbery Honor, 1931.

  Summary: In 1490s Portugal, Abel Zakuto, a Jewish banker with a keen interest in mapmaking and sea navigation, encourages explorers Magellan, da Gama, and Diaz to find the elusive sea route around the “Devil’s Cave”—the Cape of Good Hope—to India, which would enable Portugal to dominate the spice trade.

  eISBN-13: 978-0-486-78247-8 (pbk.)

  1. Explorers—Fiction. 2. Magellan, Ferdinand, d. 1521— Fiction. 3. Gama, Vasco da, 1469–1524—Fiction. 4. Jews—Portugal—Fiction. 5. Portugal—History—Period of discoveries, 1385–1580—Fiction.] I. Ward, Lynd, 1905–1985, illustrator. II. Title.

  PZ7.H448Sp 2014

  [Fic]—dc23

  2013028952

  Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation

  49287701 2014

  www.doverpublications.com

  To the memory of

  ARTHUR STURGES HILDEBRAND

  BECAUSE OF HIS BEAUTIFUL

  MAGELLAN

  CONTENTS

  1·Out of the Night

  2·Nicolo Conti

  3·Abel Zakuto’s Workshop

  4·The Two Abels

  5·The Locked Door

  6·Sofala — The Devil’s Cave

  7·The Caged Bird

  8·Scander

  9·Sugar

  10·Nejmi

  11·Debacle

  12·The Lighted Workshop

  13·A Street Quarrel

  14·Vasco da Gama

  15·Rumours

  16·Abel Visits the Palace

  17·The Venetian Ambassador

  18·The Will of Allah

  19·The King’s Marmosets

  20·The Workshop Lamp

  21·Arthur Rodriguez

  22·The Bar

  23·Nejmi’s Dowry

  24·Dom Vasco da Gama

  25·A Letter

  SPICE AND THE DEVIL’S CAVE

  CHAPTER 1

  Out of the Night

  THE GROUP in Abel Zakuto’s workshop hitched chairs closer to the table spread with a huge map, eyes intent on Captain Diaz’ brown forefinger, as it traced along the bulge of Africa’s west coast.

  “Cape Verde, Guinea-all that’s an old story to Portugal now; and this … and this … as anyone can see by our stone pillars all along the way. Then”– the brown forefinger that had slid rapidly southward stopped short –“then, the big Cape. . . . And the last of our pillars!” he added under his breath.

  The circle of eager eyes lifted to the tanned face with something very like reverence, for not one around the table but knew that, if Bartholomew Diaz had had his way, the stone pillars would never have stopped at the Cape.

  Into the mind of young Ferdinand Magellan, hunched up over the table, flashed a memory of the first time he had heard of Bartholomew Diaz. Up to the family home, in high, lonely Sabrosa,1 had come the story of this man who had marked the farthest bound in the search for the sea route to India, which he had named the Cape of Storms. Ferdinand quickened to the picture that the story had called up to his childish fancy: the man gazing from his fragile, tossing ship at the awesome rock, while the great Cape, waiting through the ages, bared its storm-swept head to hail this first white face.

  He suddenly leaned over the map and closely inspected it. Then he looked up at Abel Zakuto. “What does this name mean?”

  Abel glanced where he pointed. “Why, that’s really the big Cape. But Fra Mauro2 showed it as an island which he called Diab – probably from the legends of the Arab sailors that the surrounding sea was the Devil’s Cave. You know King John liked to call it The Cape of Good Hope.”

  “I like Devil’s Cave!” exclaimed Ferdinand. “Sounds exciting.”

  Diaz gave him an amused look. “You’d think ‘twas exciting,” he told him.” Greatest commotion of wind and water there ever I saw—like ten thousand devils set loose-just as the Arabs believed.”

  He sat back in his chair, his smile gone. He appeared to have forgotten the map as he stared absently before him.

  Across the table a man eyed him as if pondering something he wished to say. A black-bearded stocky figure he was, not much past thirty, with a long-nosed, forceful face – Vasco da Gama, a gentleman of King Manoel’s court. His father had once been Comptroller of the royal household, and had been intended, in John’s reign, to head an expedition to explore a sea route to India. Vasco, himself, had seen service at sea and had soldiered in Spain and Africa. Lately, with all Europe agog over the Way to the Spices, he’d begun to brush up on navigation, and occasionally came to look at Abel Zakuto’s maps.

  “Have you any doubt, Captain,” he at last ventured, “that the coast east of the Cape makes up to India as Mauro showed it?”

  “No, I haven’t,” Diaz replied bluntly. “But what use is that if I can’t say I know it does? No, Gama, all I know is only what I’ve seen, and that’s the coast this side of the Cape – barring some score leagues beyond.”

  Young Magellan made an impatient gesture. “Covilham had no doubts about the coast east of the Cape,” he said, pointedly.

  His tone made the older men smile. This youngster just missed being a nuisance with his ever ready willingness to challenge one’s statements, only that he was always so sure of his facts, and so amazingly well informed! Covilham! – What other lad in Lisbon would have known enough to ask this question? For Pedro de Covilham had started out on his great errand to verify by land what Bartholomew Diaz was sent to verify by sea, when this boy was hardly more than waist high—at least half a dozen years before he had come down from Traz-os-Montes to the palace at Lisbon for his page’s training.

  “Covilham said it was clear sailing,” Ferdinand persisted, “east of the Cape, now didn’t he?”

  From under his grizzled brows Bartholomew Diaz studied him with amused pride. After his own heart, this lad, with the great, sombre eyes that seemed to see beyond ordinary vision. That readiness to question, that rebellion against the passive acceptance of the mass – ah, that was the stuff of which pioneers were made! His own kinsmen, for instance: suppose they had believed all that nonsense about there being nothing beyond Cape Bojador but a chaos of boiling seas. But now, no one would soon forget that John Diaz was the very first of his race to take the dare of the great promontory and double its forbidding coasts; that Diniz Diaz was first to reach Cape Verde, and Vicente Diaz first at the Cape Verde islands; that he, Bartholomew, had sailed farther than any of them – though he did say it, who shouldn’t! And young Magellan, you could depend on ft, would go as far some day; perhaps farther.

  “But Covilham didn’t come home to tell what he’d found, as Captain Diaz did,” Gama observed. “All we have to go by is that he sent word back from Cairo to Lisbon that he’d got down the east coast of Africa as far as Sofala, and that if our
ships would just keep on from Guinea they’d find a clear passage to India and the spices. But, if he didn’t get beyond Sofala, how could he be sure of that?”

  “Well, even so –” Ferdinand’s arm shot out to the map, thumb on the Cape, and little finger on Sofala –“all that’s left to prove is the gap between this, where you left off, Master Diaz,” tapping with his thumb, “and this” tapping with his finger, “where Covilham left off.” Triumphantly he looked around the table to score his point, as he flattened his palm to indicate the reach from thumb to finger tip.

  “Yes, anyone can see that’s ‘all,’” Gama drily retorted. “The point is, how much of an ‘all’ is it? If the coast runs north from the Cape to Sofala, well and good; but if, somewhere in between, it should happen to make out to the east, and then down into the frozen south …”

  Ferdinand heaved a long sigh. “I’d be willing to stake everything I had to settle it!”

  Captain Diaz shrugged. “So would any of us, if there were only one’s self to consider.” Wouldn’t he, he meditated, have “settled” this tantalizing gap, ten years ago and more, only for having to turn back for that doubting, homesick crew of his?

  “The one thing to do, King Manoel won’t do – go and find out!” Abel Zakuto quietly stated.

  Everyone always listened to what Abel had to say. He always struck at the core of a situation; led you back to the main argument when you inclined toward side issues.

  “He’s too busy trying to manoeuvre his head into the Spanish crown to bother with finding a passage to India!” Ferdinand said, sarcastically.

  “He’d have no trouble getting crews,” Diaz grumbled. “Everybody’d want to go! All he has to do is to finish the ships that King John began for an eastern expedition and would have sent out-under your father, Gama – if death hadn’t blocked him.”

  There was no one in the room who had forgotten that it was Diaz, himself, who had designed those ships and watched over their beginnings; but only he knew the bitterness of seeing those idle hulls and their half-finished rigging left to rot – for all Manoel seemed to care – in the dockyards.

  “It always seemed to me,” Abel took him up, “that John got just what he deserved. Here, years ago, John Cabot came all the way from Venice to beg an outfit to discover a passage to India; the same thing happened again, in the case of Columbus, and John turned both of them away-deliberately lost two great chances for Portugal. Life doesn’t go on holding the door open, you know. There comes a time when it slams it shut in your face!”

  “But wouldn’t you think,” Diaz demanded, “with Spain so keen over Columbus’s two cruises that they’re outfitting him for a third voyage, and news that the English Henry is getting John Cabot ready to find a sea passage, that Manoel would be afraid they’d find the way to the Indies first?”

  The evening always finished that way: eager speculation, comment, mounting hopes, finally ending against the dead wall of Manoel’s callousness to the big issue of the time.

  Bartholomew Diaz pushed his chair back from the table, got up, said good night and went out. Gama soon followed, and only Ferdinand and Abel remained. In fact, it was the usual sequel of these meetings, that the boy would stay on to talk of the all-engrossing topic.

  Abel studied him now, as Bartholomew Diaz had, earlier in the evening. But where Diaz had noted evidence of personal traits, Abel read evidence of the national character. The sturdy build, the air of ruthless determination coupled with a certain arrogance toward danger, all reflected, Abel said to himself, generations that had been trained on Portugal’s littoral to the combat of the sea, or hardened in struggles with the Moors.

  At this point in Abel’s meditations, his wife, Ruth, came in with a dish of figs preserved in grape treacle from a famous recipe that she claimed came from Palestine. Ferdinand sprang up and greeted her with an affectionate little gesture. He’d been a favourite with Ruth ever since she had seen him as a toddling youngster, when she was visiting friends at Sabrosa, and he knew those figs had been brought in especially for him.

  “Help yourself, child, they’ll sweeten your dreams after all that dry talk,” she told him. “How you can spend so much time over those stupid old maps I can’t see. Stuffy in here as a dungeon, too, with all you men hived up together!”

  She pushed the map to one side of the table, set the dish at Ferdinand’s hand, bustled across the room, and flung open the door into the garden-court.

  Ruth was short and stout, with a way of trotting about as she talked, while she punctuated her remarks with little sidewise nods that reminded one of a bird cocking its head from side to side. Everything about her was intensely practical. When other women’s skirts swept the ground, Ruth’s neatly cleared, and homespun for every day but the Sabbath was, to her mind, wasteful and frivolous. She prided herself on a fresh muslin cap each morning as much as she did on her clean house and the trim flower beds. Her mind was as practical as her capable hands: anything, for instance, outside of established fact she treated as cobwebs or weeds, and neither Abel nor his friends were under any illusions as to her opinion of the discussions in his workshop.

  “You’d stay here in this close air till you choked!” she scolded, as she sat down; then, “Aren’t you going to sample my preserves?” she impatiently demanded, while she pulled at the girdle of her tight-fitting waist.

  Abel reached over and helped himself to the confection, meditatively gazing into the darkness beyond the open door. Ferdinand, seething to continue the theme of the evening, watched the older man for a sign to begin.

  “Well, Ferdinand, let’s have it!” Abel finally said, his eyes twinkling.

  “Yes, sir!” The boy’s hand smote the table with a blow that made Ruth jump, and his sombre eyes blazed. “I can’t get over it, Master Abel – the shame of it! Here’s the merchantmen of Venice and Genoa bringing back the goods of the Orient, and trading with everybody all up and down both sides of the Mediterranean, their flags flying as complacent as you please, here in Lisbon harbour, as if they owned the place, while our ships sometimes – only sometimes, mind you-get left-over cargoes that no one else is keen about. Think of it – Portugal taking the leavings of Venice, by heaven! Why shouldn’t we be bringing back the cargoes from the Orient? I don’t mean by way of the Mediterranean, either!”

  “I know, I know,” Abel nodded. “You mean direct from the Orient, around by the Devil’s Cave.”

  “Heavens, yes! Of course that’s what I mean,” Ferdinand snapped out. “Then where’d Venice and Genoa be? And Spain and England?”

  “I declare,” laughed Ruth, “I believe you’d like a chance to spite Spain and England!”

  “Don’t you think for a minute that they don’t feel the same way about us!” the boy retorted. “Aren’t they both doing their best to crowd us out of the race for India? And we could have been there before Spain ever thought of sending out Columbus, if we’d only followed Captain Diaz’ lead! But now, Spain claims that Columbus has reached the Orient; by way of the west, to be sure, but still reached it.”

  “There is no doubt Columbus has found something,” Abel said thoughtfully, “but whether it’s the Orient, or even any part of the Orient – Look here, Ferdinand,” he broke in on himself, “you know, and I know, that those half-naked savages and those rude gewgaws that Columbus brought back don’t tally with the great cities and the costly trade that men who’ve been in the Orient tell about – men like Marco Polo and his compatriots Conti, and Cabot, and even our own Covilham.”

  “Well,” Ferdinand offered, “to do Columbus justice, all he claims is that what he’s found is the undeveloped outskirts of Cipangu3 or Cathay.4 But if we could settle what we’ve all but proved,” he pursued, in a low, vehement voice, “if we could reach India by way of the Cape, then, Portugal – Lisbon –” He broke off, his face working.

  “Lisbon would be,” Abel finished for him, “the port of entry to Europe of the Orient’s trade. Lisbon would be – what Venice now is!”
>
  “But if we lose,” the boy choked out, “if we lose, we’ll have to stand by, while Spain, or London gets the trade. And yet, Manoel can’t see it! The biggest chance the world has ever offered-and he letting it slip through his fingers!”

  “Just listen to the child!” cried Ruth. “Breaking his heart over something he doesn’t even know exists!”

  “Don’t say that!” Ferdinand said, sharply. “I’d – I’d – stake my soul that the Way of the Spices lies as plain as a road from us to India, just as Covilham says.” He turned almost pleadingly to Abel. “You believe that, Master Abel, don’t you?”

  As Abel started to speak, the two others saw his lips, even in the very act of forming an answer, freeze into stark amazement, his eyes focused on some object behind them.

  With one impulse they whirled about to see, poised in the doorway, as if in arrested flight, a bare-legged, ragged figure. Out of the pallid face stared great, dark eyes dilated by a madness of fear that wiped out every other expression.

  For an astounded moment Ferdinand waited for the apparition to vanish-as it had come-like a wraith. No! . . . That was flesh, human, alive, that quivered under the torn breeches, and that was blood on the thin hands – one could even see where it had stained the tattered coat. Just a poor, frightened lad, of perhaps his own age!

  A chair scraped the floor – Ruth ran past him to the door, and drew the pitiful figure inside. All at once he heard her cry out, saw her draw back. He started forward – as suddenly halted. Had he seen – or imagined – two braids of long, dark hair tucked under the ragged coat?

  “It’s a girl, Abel – a girl!” Ruth was stammering.

  At the sound of her voice the terror-stricken eyes glanced back into the court; then, like a wild creature seeking cover, the girl seized Ruth’s hands and dragged her into the room beyond the workshop.

  “Someone is hunting her!” Abel cried. “The door, Ferdinand-quick!”