by Ross King
But Quesada found nothing, nor did his niece's husband, Antonio de Berrío, a veteran explorer of the Orinoco and its tributaries whom Sir Walter Raleigh captured after the sack of Trinidad in 1595. That same year the Englishman, fired by the legends, ascended the Orinoco with a hundred men and provisions for a month. Only when the supplies were exhausted did he return to England, taking with him the son of an Indian chieftain and leaving behind to explore the river two of his most trusted crewmen. One of them was captured by Spanish soldiers, though not before he sent back to England a crude map showing the supposed site of a gold mine at the confluence of the Orinoco and Caroní rivers. But it would be another twenty years before Raleigh returned to Guiana for his disastrous final voyage, this time in the company of Sir Ambrose Plessington.
The serving-girl, Bridget, had entered the room with a pot of tea whose fragrant steam was curling through the air. I was gnawing at my lower lip as I perched in the chair, studying the rows of atlases overhead. I could see Martin Waldseemüller's Universalis Cosmographia and several editions of Ptolemy's Geography, including the one by Gerardus Mercator. Alethea, catching my gaze, set down her cup and pushed back her chair.
'A number of these maps and atlases are extremely rare,' she said, rising to her feet. 'Some are among the rarest and most valuable items in the entire collection. This one, for example.' She was standing on tiptoe, reaching for one of the volumes, which she then proceeded to flump on to the table between us, rattling our teacups. I was startled to see the water-damaged copy of Ortelius, the Theatrum orbis terrarum, the same volume I had inspected in the laboratory: the one from which I had cut the cipher. 'Do you know it?'
'I sell copies of it, yes,' I replied as she opened the buckram cover. I cocked my head and tried to read the colophon. 'This is the Prague edition?'
'Yes, published in the year 1600.' She began riffling through the crimped pages. 'It's extremely rare. Only a few copies were ever printed. Ortelius had travelled to Bohemia at the invitation of the Emperor Rudolf. Unfortunately he died in 1598, soon after his arrival in Prague. Some of the physicians claimed that he died of an ulcer of the kidneys, which Hippocrates tells us is nearly always fatal in old men.' Slowly she turned over one of the pages. 'Others believed that the great Ortelius was poisoned.'
'Is that so?' I glanced at the atlas, recalling the rumours mentioned by Mr. Barnacle. The volume was now open at a sheet displaying the legend 'MARE PACIFICUM'-the very point at which I had discovered the cipher. 'Why should that have been?' I was trying to remember what Mr. Barnacle had said about voyages through the islands in the high latitudes. 'Because of the new method of map projection?'
She shook her head. 'No such method of projection has yet been perfected. How those rumours started I have no idea, unless they were the invention of whoever murdered Ortelius.'
'So Ortelius was murdered?'
She nodded. 'After his death the plates from which the maps were engraved disappeared from the printshop. Or I should say one plate disappeared, that from which this particular map was engraved.' She tapped the rippled sheet with her forefinger, 'You see, the map of the New World in the Prague edition of the Theatrum orbis terrarum is different from those in any of the others.'
I was still scanning the page, wondering if I ought to believe her account any more than Mr. Barnacle's. There was an elaborate cartouche-'AMERICAE SIVE NOVI ORBIS, NOVA DESCRIPTIO'-and a representation of the Pacific Ocean, complete illustrations of islands and fully rigged galleons. Everything on the sheet looked precisely the same as on those dreamy afternoons at Molitor & Barnacle, including the scales of latitude and longitude.
'Map making is a speculative art,' she said as she turned the atlas 180 degrees on the table to face me. Again she tapped it with her finger, this time just above the cartouche. 'Look here. What do you see?'
Beneath her index finger I could make out a cluster of a half-dozen islands and the legend 'Insulæ Salomonis'. I shrugged and looked up. 'The Solomon Islands,' I replied cautiously.
'Precisely. But no one knows if the Solomon Islands are actually found at the spot where Ortelius places them. Indeed, no one even knows if they truly exist or if they were only the fantasy of Alvaro de Mendaña, who claimed to have sighted them in the year 1568. He named them the Islas de Solomón because he believed them to be the islands on which King Solomon mined the gold for his Temple in Jerusalem. But King Solomon must have been a better navigator than Mendaña, because the Spaniard never again found the islands. He made a second voyage in search of them in 1595, but with no luck. His pilot, Quirós, made a third in 1606, and many have searched since then. But they appear to have sunk into the ocean one and all, like Atlantis. They remain as elusive as Terra australis incognita, which Mendaña and Quirós had also hoped to discover.' Her finger had drifted down the page before stopping to the left of the cartouche, where I could read the inscription 'TERRA AUSTRALIS'. The rest of the space, a large continent whose coast ran down the map's two-hundredth meridian, was blank and featureless. 'Another mythical land portrayed by Ortelius.'
'The continent described in Ptolemy's Geography,' I said, wondering what such legendary islands had to do with Galileo or the libraries of Prague.
'And in Arab and Chinese documents as well. Rumours of its existence have circulated for centuries. The Spaniards sent numerous expeditions to discover it, all in vain, though in 1606 Quirós discovered a landmass, in fact only islands, that he named Australia del Espiríto Santo. Afterwards it was sought by the Dutch, likewise in vain until a number of their ships bound for Java were blown off course and made landfalls along the coast of an enormous island guarded by coral reefs. Twenty years later some of their ships explored a coastline that stretches from the tenth parallel of latitude below the equator to the thirty-fourth. So it now appears that Terra australis incognita is something more than a myth. And if Terra australis incognita exists, then who is to say that the Islas de Solomón do not also exist?' She leaned forward and with her forefinger traced a path across the Pacific to the right-hand side of the sheet. 'Look here. You'll see that the Prague edition includes an interesting variant.'
I peered closely at the page. The light from the rain-streaked window was so dim I had to strain my eyes to see its image. But there, some thirty or forty degrees of longitude west of Peru, a dozen parallels south of the equator, in the middle of Ortelius's vast Mare Pacificum, was a tiny rectangular island marked 'Manoa'. This particular detail was not included on any of Mr. Smallpace's editions, of that I was certain.
'But I thought Manoa was in Guiana or Venezuela.'
'As did everyone else. But to Ortelius it was an island in the Pacific Ocean, that great cavity left in the earth when the moon broke free. It would be found to the west of Peru and to the east of the fabled Islas de Solomón, on the 280th meridian east of the Canary Islands, which is what Ortelius, following Ptolemy, uses as his prime meridian. Or that, at least, is where Manoa is placed in the Prague edition of 1600.' She rose to her feet and carefully slid the volume back on to its shelf. 'You see, none of the other editions of Ortelius portrays Manoa,' she explained as she returned to her chair, 'either in the Pacific or anywhere else. That is what makes the Prague edition unique. And that, of course, is what Sir Ambrose found so intriguing.'
'But there were other maps of Manoa,' I protested, remembering Raleigh's map, engraved in Amsterdam by Hondius, that I used to explore with my fingers as I crouched between the shelves in Mr. Molitor's shop.
'Yes, but most were crude affairs. Manoa was located all over the continent. But after Mercator it became possible for navigators to make use of latitude and longitude when plotting their courses. They could steer a straight course over a long distance without continually adjusting their compass readings. All that was needed was a ruler, a divider and a compass. Mere child's play.'
'Yes,' I nodded. 'Except for the minor detail that no one knows how to find the longitude at sea.'
'Yes, there is the rub,' she replied, retu
rning to the shelf. 'Finding latitude is easy enough, even below the equator where the Pole Star cannot be sighted. One merely finds the sun's altitude at noon by means of a sundial or suchlike. But longitude is as difficult a proposition as squaring the circle.'
It was the ancient problem, I knew, that bedevilled all mariners. Longitude is merely another name for the time difference between two places. In principle its calculation, as I understood it, was a simple enough exercise. Whether over London or the Solomon Islands, or anywhere else on earth, the sun always reaches its maximum altitude at twelve o'clock, the local noon. Thus if a navigator in the Solomon Islands could know, at the moment of his local noon, the precise time in London, he could calculate the longitude of his position by the difference between the two times, since each hour equals fifteen degrees of longitude. That was all well and good, but how could someone possibly know the time in London when he finds himself stranded halfway round the world, on the shores of the Solomon Islands?
'Not even the ancients with all of their wisdom could solve the problem,' Alethea was saying. 'Ptolemy in his Geography discusses the method of Hipparchos of Nicaea, who advocates using observations of lunar eclipses as a way of measuring the differences in local time east or west of a fixed point. Then Johann Werner of Nuremberg'-she pointed to a volume on the wall-'proposes in his edition of Ptolemy the so-called lunar-distance method by which the moon and the zodiac form a celestial clock that determines local time at every point round the globe. But neither of these methods succeeds either at sea or in distant lands to which reliable timekeepers cannot be transported.'
'Which is why Mendaña and Quirós were unable to find the Solomon Islands when they returned to the Pacific.'
'Precisely. Because in 1568 Mendaña recorded them at the 212th meridian east of the Canary Islands, only to find when he returned to search for them in 1595 that the 212th meridian was as troublesome to locate as the islands themselves.'
'So Ortelius's map is valueless,' I said. 'It's no more accurate than any of the others.'
She resumed her seat and poured two more cups of tea, which was a rare drink in those days, one I had sampled only two or three times before. It seemed to set my nerves on edge. My hand was trembling as I reached for the cup.
'No doubt the scale of longitude is nothing more than informed guesswork,' she replied at length. 'But the island? Is that also a fiction? And, if so, why should the map have been suppressed?'
'Who suppressed it, then? The Spaniards?'
'So Sir Ambrose believed. And they would have had good reason to do so. Prague would have been the last place on earth where the King of Spain and his ministers would have wished such a secret document to appear. Its colleges were rife with Protestants, Hermeticists and Jews, along with every sort of mystic and fanatic. Exactly the sort who, twenty years later, so terrified the cardinals in the Holy Office. And so the great Ortelius was poisoned and his map suppressed.'
She closed the book and regarded me carefully. I could hear someone crossing the atrium and rain splashing from the downspouts. A large pool of water was enlarging about the sundial, and more was spilling over the cracked rim of the fountain. In the distance, beyond the stunted orchard, I saw the dip-well and cress-pond, also overflowing, their swollen surfaces pocked and bubbling. I shuffled my feet nervously on the carpet, remembering the approaching coach.
'That might have been the end of the story,' she said at last, 'except for one small detail. It concerns a ship, Mr. Inchbold. A Spanish galleon. One discovered quite by accident in the waters of the Caribbean.' Thunder crackled louder now and rain dashed against the window. 'Perhaps in your investigations you have learned something about it? It was called the Sacra Familia.'
***
Streaks of lightning were followed by mortar-bursts of thunder. In the midst of one of the loudest crashes Bridget appeared in the library doorway with a fish-oil lamp. She set it on the table and removed the tray of tea, her shoes scuffing along the tiles. Alethea too had crossed the floor. For several minutes she worked busily at the shelves, standing on a step-ladder and plucking down books like someone picking apples in an orchard. But then she returned to the table clutching an armful of volumes, which she began scattering in an avalanche across its surface. I caught one of the tumbling books before it slipped over the edge and was surprised to see Duplessis-Mornay's De la vérité de la religion chrétienne, the work of Hermetic philosophy translated into English by Sir Philip Sidney.
'… republished in new editions and translations,' she was saying over the din of the rain as the books tumbled over each other and on to the table. 'The Apologia of William of Orange, The Spanish Colony by Bartolomé de Las Casas, the Relaciones of the English informer Antonio Pérez…'
As she sorted through the pile, I caught a glimpse in the lamplight of the treatise by Las Casas, the Spanish priest who had catalogued atrocities committed by the conquistadores among the Indians.
'Even the printers and booksellers had joined the fight against Spain. These books and dozens of others, all were smuggled by their thousands into every corner of the Spanish Empire to rouse bands of defeated rebels and other malcontents in Catalonia, Aragon and Calabria. They were even translated into Arabic and smuggled into Africa to be read by the Moriscos whom Philip III banished from Spain. Now thousands of Moriscos, like the rebels in Calabria and Catalonia, were poised to pluck up their arms and once more fight the Castilians. Only this time all of Protestant Europe would be fighting at their side.'
So it was that I found myself listening for a second time to the story of Raleigh's expedition, to the tale of scheming bishops and princes from all across Europe making secret plans for a coup de main against their common enemy, the King of Spain. But on this telling King Philip had lost something of his omnipotence. The English and Dutch spies along the waterfront of La Coruña and in the limestone alleyways of Cádiz were reporting that his navy had not yet recovered from the destruction of the so-called Invincible Armada, whose loss in '88 was but the first straw in the wind foretelling the end of his vast empire. The galleons were not being replaced or repaired because timber stocks on the Iberian peninsula had been badly depleted, and because there was no money to build them anyway-for spies in the House of Trade had reported that bullion imports from America had dropped from nine thousand tons per annum to a little more than three thousand. Philip was heavily in debt to the hombres de negocio as a result, as were dozens of merchants and shipowners in Seville who could only watch helplessly as silver collapsed and the galleon trade shrank. A major European war-a war the Spaniards could not possibly win-would put an end once and for all to the Spanish convoys which twice each year swept the treasures of the New World five thousand miles across the Atlantic to Andalucía. All that was wanting was the quickmatch to light the powder-train-a match that was due to be struck by Sir Ambrose and the soldiers on board the Philip Sidney.
But the planned mission ended in débâcle. I listened again to the story of how the daring enterprise was scuppered by informers in the Navy Office and on board the Destiny herself. At least, the enterprise failed until the Philip Sidney, sailing homeward through the Windward Passage, came upon the remnants of the Mexican fleet, which had been scattered along the coast of Cuba by one of the fierce storms that Spanish navigators call a huracán. What followed was an accident, a rare stroke of good fortune in the midst of disaster. Indeed, Sir Ambrose might never have stumbled across the convoy, Alethea said, had it not been for a peculiar smell reported by the deckhands while the ship was in soundings some ten leagues west of the Spanish harbour at Santiago de Cuba.
'A smell?' I remembered Biddulph's description of the aromatic galleon. 'What manner of smell?'
'Perfume,' she replied. 'The entire sea smelled of perfume, or perhaps incense. Can you imagine anything so strange? At first the men on board the Philip Sidney thought it nothing more than a hallucination, for hallucinations are common enough at sea. Most have to do with colours, such as when the waves
look green so that the ship appears to be moving across fields of grass. Yet no one on board the Philip Sidney had ever known the like of this particular hallucination, not even Sir Ambrose. Then, as the smell grew stronger, a sailor in one of the fighting-tops spotted something on the horizon.'
'A galleon,' I murmured.
'A fleet of galleons,' she replied.
It was the convoy from New Spain, three weeks out of Veracruz: fourteen galleons shaping their course northeast-by-north through rough seas towards the Tropic of Cancer and then the higher latitudes, the 40s and 50s, to escape the northeasterly Trades. Fourteen ships alone on the shimmering water that funnelled and whirlpooled between Hispaniola and the Cabo Maisí, most of them so heavily laden that their lower gunports were all but under water. They should have been met already by the armada de la guardia de la carrera which would escort them as far as the Canaries, but the squadron had failed to arrive, probably on account of the same winds that for the previous two days had battered the convoy along the coast of Cuba. Now thirteen of the ships were huddled together in formation like a pod of whales as they rounded the windswept cape, but the fourteenth was listing badly. Already it had fallen several bow-shots off the pace.