Fire in the Abyss

by Stuart Gordon

  I blush. King Edward never happened, it was Drake who did what I dreamed, and as for my knighthood, it came not for Discovery, but for killing Irishmen. But luckily then I knew little, even the cunning man seemed only a silly bogey, and on the next day I was early into Uncle’s study. I turned first to the Ptolemy.

  It was the splendidly thick and weighty Strassburg edition of 1513. Within it were the wood-cut maps of Waldseemüller.

  The maps!

  How can I tell this? Waldseemüller’s maps seized me. They grabbed me by the scruff of the neck, shook me up, referenced my dreaming to a real world. Golden Ships? Until then I’d had no sense of scale. There was only beyond-the-horizon. I had never seen a proper map. I was young, and Navigation and Science were young arts, still thought occult. At Eton I’d seen only a wheel map, a mappa-mundi, with Jerusalem in the middle, saints and angels all choiring round the perimeter, and dragons rioting through imaginary symmetrical symbolic continents—as big a lie as Mandeville, and as true to its time. Apart from this, and a Portolan chart of the Atlantic coasts which Sir Gawen Carew showed me the year after my father died, I had seen only the rutters of the sea-captains—their pilot-books, with bearings, soundings, winds, descriptions of currents and ports.

  But they were not maps!

  New knowledge! New ways to see!

  Waldseemüller struck and lit me with increased sense of the world, of the vastness, of what we live to do, which in my opinion is to go beyond our limitations. With a shaky finger I traced the outline of the New World, and I felt my destiny snake over the globe, carried on this occult chart!

  So, you say, a map is just a map, showing you how to get from A to B. Perhaps. Yet to me that day saw my initiation into a secret new language. Secret, for it demanded that the mind grasp it. And new, therefore imperfect, and subject to change, as I soon learned, when I came to compare the map in the Ptolemy with a later map by Waldseemüller, his last, in the Cosmographiae Introductio.

  In his last map Waldseemüller abandons the past. He rejects Ptolemy and fifteen centuries of tradition. He accepts new measurement, reduces the longitude of Asia to near its true dimension—and for the very first time the New World is named America!

  Yes! I first heard of America at Christmas of the year 1550! In my life it was conversion as dramatic as that of Saul on the road to Damascus! For those last two days before returning to Eton I sat entranced at Uncle’s desk, drinking in the maps, the fire gusting or gone out, the lamplight flickering madly whenever the wet winter gale struck through the chinks. But I felt no chill. For hour after hour I sat, gaze moving back and forth between the maps, at last beginning to get my first adult measure of the world, of myself and my purpose. The New World! Discovery! Our awakening after centuries of sleep! Can you imagine how that astronomer felt two years ago when he discovered Persephone beyond Pluto? I’m sure I felt the same awed exaltation when I met the maps. Yes, and I felt fear at those empty spaces of the Unknown World, and the sense of imminent loss of a comfortable mothering past. “A power not of Christ and not of this world?” How could I drive it entirely from mind? Yet the awe and sense of purpose were greater. And that last night before return to Eton I fell asleep with my head on the crude, distorted, unfinished map of America, with all its north and west unknown. Uncle came in with my mother, and they found me there.

  My mother was big again. We embraced, carefully.

  “Have you found your Golden Ships?” she greeted me, laughing.

  “Yes,” I said, “I have. They’re not made yet, but they will be!”

  I was a humorless brat, but the maps inspired me. They ended my childhood. Now, I say, we need new maps, of new worlds.

  6. How Humf Has Fought for His Beliefs

  Yes. In my life I met the maps forty years ago, but in the history of the world it is forty plus four hundred, and sometimes each of those hundreds is like a ton of lead on the neck. Now the physical world’s no longer unknown, but fenced, staked, mapped, whipped, and bruised to its uttermost end! But I’ll not start a rant. Two or so years ago in San Francisco for a time I ranted violently and often against everything. Once I nearly killed myself by kicking in a TV screen to stop the similar ranting of Thaddeus Carpenter, that lunatic who thieves a vast following of gullible souls in America with his Plutonium Power for Christ rot. “JESUS IS WITH AMERICA!” he was raving, flushed with rage, “WE NEED PLUTONIUM POWER FOR CHRIST TO KEEP THE GODDAMN COMMUNISTS AND ATHEISTS AT BAY, SO GET OFF YOUR FAT ASS AND SEND ME MONEY NOW, OR BY SWEET CHRIST I PROMISE YOU’LL BE LEFT OUTSIDE WHEN THE BIG ONE DROPS!”

  When I heard this I shouted furiously, I ran at him and kicked his face in. There was a flash, a shock that threw me back. That foul blight on humanity! It makes me shudder still to remember my youth, and all the fanatics who claimed Christ as their own—and how I have ranted too! That mottled man! As for the shock I got, it spurred me to self-examination, to begin awakening from the hate which had consumed me since Denver. The TV set was not mine, and cost three hundred bucks to replace. And ranting never did give me anything but a headache.

  I’m nervous.

  This wet gusty morning I went out walking and met the farmer from Gwernacca, a burly middleaged man called Griffith. It’s he that owns and rents out this house, and two hundred acres of the land about are also his. No doubt he lived here before moving the family to the new house at Gwernacca. “He’s a tightmouthed old sod,” Michael said. “You won’t get much out of him.”

  I met him briefly the day we drove here, when Michael stopped at Gwernacca to say I’d be staying a while to write a book, but today is the first time we have talked. We came on each other round a bend and could not avoid it. I said something about the weather and he grunted, eyeing me with surly composure. I disarmed him only when I remembered a little Welsh. He shot a response, I managed reply, he laughed in surprise. “Well, now!” said he in his singsong so fast I could hardly follow. “You haff the words, like, but for a moment I did not know what you were saying at all! You haff the strangest accent I effer heard!” I laughed too.

  “It’s a long time since I tried the tongue,” I told him.

  He asked me to his house “for a little tot, like,” driving us there in his Landrover, and in the parlour poured me a whiskey big enough to swim a goldfish in. I said “Iechyd Da!” His wife, a pleasant grey-haired woman, took off her apron and joined us, then one of his sons, a muscular lad, roared up in his car and clumped in, first removing his Wellington boots at the door.

  They questioned me indirectly, as the Welsh always did. “So your book’s coming along well?” asked Griffith.

  “Well enough,” I said.

  “You’ll be from England, then?” asked Mrs. Griffith.

  “I was born there,” I said.

  But the son eyed me challengingly. “Good to have folk in the old house,” he said bluntly, “but a lot of folk hereabouts don’t like us renting to foreigners.” He looked hard at his father.

  “The man speaks a little Welsh,” said Griffith, almost defensively.

  “Well, so he does!” replied the son, shrugging, and faced me again. “I’ve got nothing against the English, mind. We have to look after our own, see, and people are talking.”

  I thanked them and left.

  So there’s gossip. There always is, in such places. It goes on the wind. Very likely the lad spreads it about to cut a figure, to get at his father, or simply because there’s nothing else to talk about. It makes me uneasy. There’s nothing I want better than to be left alone, and I could be happy here, I could make my peace, for the house is friendly, the hills are even older than I am. It is wet, and wild, but that is comforting. The only thing I cannot live with is continual dread. The Dancer said the Fifth World approaches, but I know nothing of that, it’s the day-to-day that concerns me.

  How long can this last?

  On my way back from Gwernacca I saw a hawk—Tari’s bird, the falconhawk, Horus—hovering high above, watching; and I felt a thrill; and
momentarily recalled the high stakes for which Tari said we fight. Then I recalled Denver, and the thrill faded into fear. If the Hawk watches, so might others. Michael, at Compton you harangued me for loose talk, but how many experts have we seen? Just one talking in his cups would be enough for rumour to reach the ears of those who can add and subtract. No doubt they know already, but don’t care, thinking me no real danger to any vested interest. Yet what did your Chancellor say to you when we got back to Compton? Why did you pack me here so fast? “Sail a tighter ship, Greene, or else!” Was that it? Or am I merely maundering? The gossip worries me, but I haven’t sensed any spies; nobody in this country cares if I have words to say against U.S. Authorities, I upset no applecarts here, I’m no insurrectionary ranter! No! I was the Queen’s Man!

  Now what can I do but write? On with it! On with it!

  My interest in finding Northwest Passage grew at Oxford. I was most studious there, but in my fourth year Mary’s men burned bishops Latimer and Ridley outside my window. The stench is with me still, and the courage with which they died. I left that papist hotbed and, later that year of 1555, got preference to Hatfield as page to Princess Elizabeth. This came through my aunt, Kate Ashley, who was governess to the future Queen, and went through much for her.

  “Mistress Ashley says you are full of new ideas,” said the Princess when we first met. She had just come in dripping-wet from the hunt, tall and pale, red hair striking against russet cloak. She was nineteen, had been in the Tower already. “You have discretion too?”

  Discretion. Yes. For three years it was the watchword. There were hunts, dances, masques—all of it—and much time spent studying with that venerable man Roger Ascham; but the main business she had was keeping her head connected with her body.

  Her sister Mary was not vindictive, but suffered the witchfire-conscience that springs from frustrated loins, being half-mad with sadness that no man really wanted her, particularly not her husband King Philip, who wanted only to bed England, not the woman.

  But my Queen was canny, never passion’s slave, using what used her, for by never marrying any man she gave herself to all, and so won our anxiety, attention, irritation, and love. As a child she knew the price, learned the act, of wearing the cloak of awful Majesty—and often at Hatfield I saw a tremendous distance on her, but then she’d laugh and make a jest. Her moods so switched it was impossible to predict or know her, as she chose. And if from these early days she listened sweetly to my dreams, she delayed twenty years before helping me to them. I could never charm her as Walter did—but he was generous, and made his good fortune mine as well.

  In 1558 she was Queen at last, but in 1562 there was plot on her life, then she almost died of the smallpox. We all stared into the abyss again. She was pressed to marry, now! So her game began.

  In 1563 I left Court and took up arms, giving as good as I got at Le Havre de Grace. For use of the port we defended Huguenots who did not want us and opened the gates to the besieging Catholic army. The French we held, but not the Plague, bringing it back to England, where it killed thousands.

  But in Havre I first considered English colonisation, for there I heard of Jean Ribault’s illfated voyage to settle Huguenots in Florida. The Spanish murdered them all. We must try farther north, I thought, out of Spain’s reach. And back in London I joined the Merchant Adventurers: a Company revived by Sebastian Cabot’s flight from Spain to England in 1547. He was a rogue, but already he had stimulated sea-searches by Chancellor then Willoughby for a Northeast Passage. It wasn’t there, but Russian trade had opened up: London now buzzed with talk of Discovery and new opportunities. I took lodgings and set to work, inventing instruments and fervently arguing for the Northwest route. At the Adventurers I had every chance to hone my passion against skeptical men. “Yes, Gilbert,” they’d laugh, “but why should this Northwest Passage exist?”

  “Why not?” I’d reply emphatically. “Quid non?”—which over the years I had to say so often that in time I took it for my motto.

  “Indeed?” they’d smile. “So where is your proof?”

  Proof? I had it at my fintertips:

  “Primus, America must be an island, as Atlantis was, for no Asian beasts have been found in America, nor any far-wandering Asian tribes such as Scythians, Tartarians, or Mongolians; and you’ll find not one explorer, not in America nor in Cathay, who has found or heard least hint of land-bridge to the other continent; not Paulus Venetus, nor Coronado nor de Gomara nor John Baros nor any.

  “Secundus, proof cosmographic: the motion of seas from east to west, following the diurnal motion of Primum Mobile, proves America to be an island with Passage to the north. Cartier says the current he followed continued strongly northwest of his furthest discovery; where else could such a current go but through the Passage?

  “Tertius, the maps of Gemma Frisius, Petrus Martyr, Tramontanus, Hunterus, Gastaldus, and others, all indicate the likelihood that the Passage exists, and is navigable!”

  And so on. But in 1556 I was assigned to Ireland as Captain of a Devon Company in Sidney’s army, sent to suppress rebellion, and for the next four years I could not escape that hell! Ireland! Is it not amazing that now in 1990 the matter is still a madness?

  Some say I acted hard there. I must speak of it.

  One summer night in San Francisco three years ago I was in a dark bar on Mission Street, getting drunk enough to go to work—no, I’ll not yet speak of that, save to say that I was in my mad ranting period, and with good reason—when a silver-haired old man turned to me from the neighbouring stool. He had a florid face full of broken veins, and he was as deep in his cups as I.

  “Name’s Butler,” he said in a thick brogue, “William Yeats Butler. They thought I’d make a poet, but I’m sixty-three years old and never written a line. Did you ever hear of an Irishman with no poetry? Well, here he is, and who are you?”

  I sighed. The night lay ahead.

  “Gilbert. Humphrey Gilbert.”

  “Well! Cut your accent in half and there’d still be plenty left over! When did you leave England?”

  I was depressed and irritable.

  “Four hundred and four years ago!” I declared frostily. (Absurd, but for a time in San Francisco this was my usual policy. By 1987 there were so many chrononuts all claiming to be DTIs stranded in the twentieth century by Project Vulcan that often I found truth my best disguise. Folk rarely turned a hair, and it was not unusual to find myself quite outdone:

  “Gilbert. 1583. Pleased to meet you”

  “Mm. Napoleon. Put it there, pal”

  Or:

  “I’m Madoc. Sailed from Gwynedd in 1170, but…”

  It didn’t always work. On this occasion it did not work, for William Yeats Butler was not amused. He glared.

  “Think I’m just another drunken paddy, don’t you?”

  “Sir,” I said, rising, “I don’t mean to offend you, but now I have to go to work. Perhaps another time.”

  I put it completely out of mind. But a week later I was in that same bar again, at the same time, when the face of William Yeats Butler loomed up before my whiskey eyes again.

  “Oh! You, is it? Sir Humphrey Gilbert! You bastard!”

  He was furious. I could hardly recall him.

  “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Doesn’t know what I mean? Liar! Bastard!”

  I was taken aback, and felt my temper rising.

  “Sir, I demand you tell me what you mean!”

  The barman told us to quieten down, Butler paid no heed. He stared aggressively at me through the smoky dimness of the place.

  “Did you not say your name is Humphrey Gilbert, and it’s from four hundred years ago you are?”

  “Yes… but…”

  “I went to the library!” Butler declared. “I’m a poor old man with no work and not much wit but you stuck in my mind. I went to the library and read all about this man you claim to be! Butchering murderer! Lining the way to his tent
in the English camp each night with the heads of the poor Irish women and children he’d killed! Why would any man call himself Humphrey Gilbert unless he was down on the Irish? Why?”

  “Well…” I started.

  “Well! Well what? Are you still claiming to be Gilbert?”

  “Well…” I said again, at a loss, meeting his eyes.

  “Well nothing!” Butler announced for all the room to hear, and I was glad there weren’t too many people there. “If you are Gilbert or not matters not at all! It’s the intention that counts! You said it’s Gilbert you are, and I went to the library and read about the bastard. I know all about it. Listen! In 1562 the great chief Shan O’Neill (God bless him!) visited London to talk with that fine young queen Elizabeth. She tricked him and would not let him leave until she had extorted false allegiance from him. When he went back to Ireland with his men he raised right rebellion, so in July 1566 she sent Sir Henry Sidney to put our man down. Our young firebrand Gilbert was in Sidney’s army, and he was just raring to cut off a few heads and prove himself a bold man…”

  “I never wanted to go to Ireland!” I protested angrily, held by the man’s mad eyes, “I did everything I could to get out of the…”

  “…And soon enough he was charging round Munster on his big black horse, waving his sword and putting hundreds of helpless starving Irish out of their misery, so they made him a colonel, and soon he had everything burned down, and all the people nice and quiet and dead or down to eating grass and carrion where they could find it. So what does he get up to next, in 1569, with Queen Lizzy’s blessing, but bring in his roughneck Devon friends, Carew and Champemoun and St. Leger, to grab the wasted land and call it an English colony? And our people found spirit at this outrage to crawl out of their graves and fight again, under James Fitzmaurice and McCarthy More—bold men they were!—but our men had no food and no weapons and brave Sir Humphrey was equal to the task. At each castle he demanded immediate surrender, and if he didn’t get it, why, he killed every man and woman and child. The English were very pleased with him, and so they made him a knight, at Drogheda, where that bloody man Cromwell murdered thousands more of us eighty years later—and may the Curse of the English be lifted from us some day soon!”