He said, “Are you able to read, Piloto?”
“Aye.”
“Read this, then.”
And he did hand me a document, all beautifully lettered on a piece of white parchment. I had some trouble with it, both because it was written in so fine a hand and because my knowledge of the language of the Portugals was only a speaking knowledge, not a reading one; but I made my way through it well enough and looked up all amazed, saying, “Am I to be captain of the pinnace, sir?”
“This is your credential to present to the governor. You are pilot and master. We have too few men to spare: you will be short of crewmen, and you will have to play two roles yourself. Have you commanded before?”
“Never.”
“Only piloted?”
“Aye,” I said, not volunteering to tell him that even my piloting experience was limited but to two voyages on this coast and one up the river to Masanganu.
“Many pilots have become masters after,” said Don Jeronymo. “They tell me you are very capable. I count on you to carry yourself well.”
I was honored by this; but also it gave me thought that I might be doing treason against England, to be taking command of a Portuguese vessel, which was a new and higher degree of service for me. It was one thing to serve as pilot, and another indeed to be the master of a ship, Portugal being formally at war with my own land. Yet I told myself it could make no difference what cap I wore aboard my vessel, so long as I committed no hostile acts against England. And I had no further time to think upon these things, because Don Jeronymo was drawing forth other documents that I was to present to the governor at São Tomé, one that set forth the problems of the Angola colony and requesting a force of some hundreds of soldiers to aid in pacifying the restless sobas of the outer provinces, and another that pledged that the São Tomé men would be permitted to harvest here as many slaves as they felt was proper, in payment for their assistance. When I had read these things Don Jeronymo’s secretary came, and sealed them all with thick brown wax, and so it was settled, that I should have charge of the voyage.
They had built a new pinnace, or rather had rebuilt one, taking an old wreck that was sitting off the isle of Loanda and putting her seaworthy. She was the Dona Leonor, not quite so tight and pretty as the Infanta Beatriz, but not vastly different in general, and she would do. But my crew was shorthanded indeed, owing to the losses by shipwreck and Jaqqa ferocity, and I had barely half the complement there had been on the Loango journey. Some of the men were known to me, such as Mendes Oliveira and Pinto Cabral and Alvaro Pires, but most were newcomers to Angola, having arrived off the recent ships from Brazil and Lisbon. If they were startled to find themselves having an Englishman as their captain, they said nothing about it; but perhaps they took it easily, thinking it was no more strange than anything else they had encountered thus far in Africa. I made my preparations swiftly and we took ourselves out to sea on the fifteenth day of June in Anno 1593.
This isle of São Tomé lies in the Gulf of Guinea some two hundred leagues northwest of the mouth of the River Zaire. Four years previous I had paid a brief call there, when I had been shipping with Abraham Cocke aboard the May-Morning, and the current or else the ignorance of Captain Cocke, or his greed, had carried us very far south of our course. Now, coming upon São Tomé from the other side, we had a hard time of it, for dry northerly winds were blowing in our teeth all the while, and we beat our way up the coast with no little expenditure of effort.
To avoid the outflow of the Zaire I took the pinnace a fair way out to sea, and that went well, but I was almost discomfited very badly in going back toward land, when I intended to halt for water and provisions at Loango. The great merit of being both master and pilot is that you are accountable to no one save God and your conscience; during our difficult passages I kept my own counsel, made a brave face of it, consulted much with my rutters and charts, and did such a shortening and lengthening of sail, such a shifting about of ropes and lines, that no one dared say me nay. We had one very bad moment when the wind veered violently from north to west in devilish gusts, a wind so strong it seemed to have a color, a light purple hue, and I was painfully reminded of the wind that had heralded my late calamity. It kicked up a high roughness of the sea as we wallowed about. Three great green waves broke over the ship and the lurches she gave burst the rigging and the shrouds on the larboard side, and one of my men was swept away and lost. But then it grew quiet, and we made repairs and continued onward to the coast, where soft waves beat mildly against the white line of the sands. At Loango we discovered the town safe: the Jaqqa encroachment that they had feared so greatly had not fallen upon them, and all was prosperous, for which they gave high credit to the mokissos that guarded them against all demons.
Beyond Loango the waters were new to me, but my charts provided me good guidance and it was only a matter of battling the contrary winds, which a sailor finds as much a part of daily routine as is pissing or putting on boots. In all these slow weeks, though, the hardest time for me came when the wind was gentle and we were making good passage. For at that hour I was standing on the bridge with Mendes Oliveira my lieutenant, both of us idle and looking toward the west, where the dark blue bowl of the sea seemed to curve away into emptiness for a thousand thousand leagues. I turned to Oliveira, a man of forty years with a weatherbeaten ugly face and a long narrow white beard, and said lightly, “This sailing goes slow. I think Don João will be in Portugal before we get ourselves into São Tomé.”
“Nay,” answered Oliveira. “That will be not.”
I pointed north-west, vaguely toward Portugal, and said, “His ship departed in May. If it be not in Lisbon by now, it cannot be far from there.”
“That much I grant you, Piloto. But though the ship may be near Lisbon, Don João is not.”
“I cannot comprehend you.”
Oliveira leaned close. “Shall I tell you a secret, that I had from Pedro Faleiro before he embarked on that same ship?”
“Speak it.”
“Don João is already dead. The order was given by Don Jeronymo, to certain agents of his aboard the ship, that on the seventh day out to sea they were to seize Don João and hurl him over the side, and report him lost by mischance.”
“What?”
“Aye, I swear it! Faleiro was drinking with the men who were hired to do it, and Andrade also, and in the tavern the two did boast that they had been paid in gold to do Don João to death, and also his mulatto concubine Dona Teresa, who—”
“Nay!” I cried, in a voice so great that it made the masts quiver. “Nay, it cannot be!”
And indeed I believed in that moment it was impossible, that Don João was too wise and well connected to fall victim to such a plot, and that my dark and dark-souled Dona Teresa, so luminous of intelligence and guided moreover by her mokisso-witching, would surely be proof against all such villainy. In the deepest pit of my soul did I deny their deaths: but then, as the tide will flow inexorably back upon rocks that have been laid high and bare, so too did fear and doubt come to sweep onto that denial and flood it with uncertainty, and after uncertainty came terror, all in the next instant. For even the mighty and the well guarded can be undone by a determined enemy, or else kings would never fall to assassins; and after my first refusal to accept their deaths came the sudden reversal of that, the agony of doubt, the dread that it was so, that my ally Don João was gone forever and that Dona Teresa, whose witchcraft had insinuated so deep into my heart and loins, would never again return to me.
Oliveira, not knowing why I was so moved and not yet realizing that I was already half berserk, said in his same quiet way, “Aye, the two of them would be given to the sharks, so it was arranged, and thus Don João never would trouble Don Jeronymo again. A pity, I did think, for Don João was a shrewd man and also a just one, and might well have—”
“Jesu!” I bellowed, and hurled myself against Oliveira as though he were Dona Teresa’s own murderer. My hands went to his throat and dug deep
, so that his eyes began to start from his face and his cheeks turned purple, and I shook him and shook him and shook him, making his head loll on his shoulders like the head of a child’s straw-stuffed poppet, and he made thick gargling sounds and slapped without effect against me, feeble as a babe. As I throttled him I continued to roar and cry aloud, and nearly the whole ship’s company came running to see what was the matter, forming a ring round us but no one at first daring to intervene in this dispute between master and second-in-command. Then Pinto Cabral, who was a wise and thoughtful man, laid a hand to my shoulder and said a few words in a gentle way, believing me mad, and in that moment I regained my senses enough to release Oliveira and hurl him from me. He went sprawling across the bridge and fetched up in a corner, trembling and gagging and stroking his throat. I too trembled, and more than trembled: I shook, I convulsed as though in a fit.
Never before had I experienced any such earthquake of the soul. I crouched against the planks, pounding my knuckles into them while tears hot as burning acid did roll into my beard and drip between my knees. To the eye of my mind came a hideous vision of ruffians seizing Dona Teresa in the night, all soft and bleary of her slumbers, and taking Don João, who slept beside her, and carrying them to the rail of the ship and hurling them swiftly and silently into the dark, perhaps slitting their throats first so that they could not call out for aid, and then Dona Teresa entering into the maw of the sea, Dona Teresa vanishing forever from sight, Dona Teresa food for the sharks—she who had spoken of being married by a Cardinal in Lisbon, she who had yearned for Rome and Paris, she who had dangled her lovely breasts across my thighs to wake my manhood, a day or two before she had sailed, she now wholly rapt into that dark and cold and enormous watery shroud—no, no, no, it was beyond thinking! I was wholly broken by it.
I know not how long I did crouch there, shaken and dazed and numbed, whether it was ten seconds or ten minutes, but at last I conquered my grief to some degree and arose, and in a low growling voice did order the seamen back to their duties, gesturing at them with my elbows and not meeting their eyes.
I went to Oliveira, who still rubbed his throat, where marks of my hands were beginning to show. He looked at me in terror, thinking perhaps that I meant to finish the job. I knelt by him and said, “Are you badly harmed?”
“Piloto, you all but slew me!”
“It was a sudden madness that came over me. I am much abashed. Can you rise?”
“Aye.”
“Come, then.”
I helped him up. His eyes were still wide and his face very red, and he was shivering as though we had passed into Arctic seas. Even now he was uncertain of me, and stood poised to run from me if my present softness were only a prelude to another attack.
Most of the crew still watched. I whirled to them and cried, “Away from here! Back to your tasks!” To Cabral I said, “You are in command for this hour.” And I said to Oliveira, “Come to my cabin with me. I will make amends to you with some good brandy-wine, and we will talk.”
“You frightened me greatly, Piloto.”
“It was a madness,” I said again. “It will not return. Come with me.”
In the narrow space of my cabin I uncorked the dark smoky brandy-wine and poured a strong dose for him and another for me, my hand still shaking so badly that I all but spilled it in the pouring, and his the same, so that he all but spilled it in the drinking. In silence we had our liquor, and at length I said, “The tale you told me gave me a deep disruption of the soul, and for the moment drove me wild with grief. I greatly regret this attack on you: I hope you will forgive me.”
He ran his finger about his sweaty collar. “I will survive, Piloto.”
“You understand how it is, when a man hears terrible news, how sometimes he strikes out at the closest at hand, even if it be someone entirely innocent?”
“Such things happen,” said Oliveira.
We drank us a second drink.
Then he looked at me and said, “May I speak with frankness, Piloto?”
“Indeed. Say anything.”
“We are not close friends, are we, but only men who have sailed together twice or thrice. And you are English, and I a Portugal, so there is little in common between us. But yet I would not want to see you come to harm, for I think you are a skillful pilot, and a man of good heart, and moreover—”
“To the point; if you will.”
“I approach the point, Piloto. It is quite plain to me that you were powerfully stricken with grief at the news I gave you, and your great emotion speaks much for your loyalty to Don João, who was your especial protector, I am aware. But nevertheless—”
“You misunderstand.”
“By your leave, let me to finish. I urge you to master your grief and put aside all feeling for Don João; for to mourn him too openly is unwise. It marks you as the enemy of Don Jeronymo, and I know in truth that there are those on board this ship who have been told by Don Jeronymo to watch you closely, lest you prove in some way a traitor to him. Any show of despair over Don João, or continued loyalty to him now, is perilous and rash.”
“I thank you for that warning. But my despair was not for Don João.”
“Not for Don João?” he said, blinking.
“If you can relive in your mind that moment when I sprang upon you, you will know that you had just told me Dona Teresa also had been marked out for death. Do you recall that? I am slow sometimes to calculate consequences, and I had not realized at the first, hearing from you of the plot against Don João, that it did extend to her as well.”
“Ah.”
“And thus when you told it to me—why, something snapped in me, d’ye see?”
“So it is true, then,” said Oliveira.
“What is?”
“That you were the lover of Dona Teresa.” And so saying, he cowered back, expecting me to leap upon him again. But all I did was laugh, in my surprise.
“You knew of that?”
He looked me slyly and, I think, a trifle enviously. “It was rumored in town. She visited you often, both when you were in the fortress and after your release, and we thought perhaps it was not merely to discuss the weather, or to play at dice. We talked much of your good fortune, to come here as a slave and then to find yourself at once in the arms of Dona Teresa.”
“Do you think Don João heard those tales, too?”
“I know not what Don João heard and what he did not, for we were not close companions, after all.”
I closed my eyes and gripped my brandy-wine flask tightly, and took a gulp of it, down deep in a single swallow. It calmed me some, but behind the burning of the brandy in my gut there was another sore fire of anguish, over Dona Teresa and over Don João, too, though that in a different way. It amazed me that I should grieve so keenly for a Portugal and for a halfbreed woman, I who was English and betrothed to fair golden-haired Anne Katherine of fading memory, but so it was, and I saw the depth of the change in me, how fully I had been thrust into this African world. And I saw, too, how frightful a place it was and how many perils loomed on all sides, reefs and bergs and floes, with these plots and counter-plots all unsuspected by me, and even myself the subject of rumor, secret surveillance, and, for all I knew, fatal conspiracy. I thought long on all of this, while Mendes Oliveira stared at me, too frightened of me to speak or to withdraw. At length I corked the bottle and arose and said, “We will talk no more of these things, eh? But I thank you for all you have said, and I beg you once again to pardon me for my madness against you. And I will be grateful for any other guidance you can give me, if I be in further danger. Agreed?”
“Agreed, Piloto.”
And he backed out of the cabin, glad, I suppose, to be gone from there.
EIGHT
VERY OFTEN in the remainder of that voyage to São Tomé did I think of Dona Teresa, and often, too, of Don João de Mendoça, and the knowledge of their fates lay upon my bosom like a cold stone lodged between my ribs, and would not ease. Never did I lose
hope of their survival, but my conviction that they were lost was stronger. As the days went by, though, that dull heavy pain of the knowledge of loss moved to a lesser zone of my awareness: it did not diminish, it did not pass, but it no longer was in the forefront of my mind. I think that is a natural process of healing. I had experienced it before, in deaths much closer to my soul, those of my father and brother and early wife Rose. We never forget the dead or cease to lament our losing of them, but the sharp edge of the pain is quickly blunted, and we learn to live with the absence that has entered our lives.
Moreover the work was fearsome hard, this beating against those ill and most contrary winds, and I had no time to give over to sorrow. Some nights I slept not at all, and others only in winks and snatches, for that a dry harsh wind from the north threatened always to turn us about, and set us catercorner to our true direction. I could not abide the risk of losing another ship. And these Portugals of mine were surprising foolish sailors, who knew everything about the sea save how to out-think it, and it was needful that I instruct them at all times what they were next to do. I told myself often that if these men were the sort of mariners who had served in the ships of Prince Henry the Navigator and the other great Portugals of ancient high repute, why, they would have scuttled themselves out of folly ere they had sailed as far as Cadiz. But that was a hundred and fifty years gone, that time when the Portugals discovered the depths of Africa and first rounded the Bona Speranza, and I suppose a hundred and fifty years is duration enough for a race to decay and grow simple, though God grant it happen not to England.
But by one way and another I did bring the pinnace safe into São Tomé, a place of dark repute, for which I bear no love.
This island is the capital of the slaving industry that the Portugals do operate in Africa. It is a small place, oval in shape or almost round, about fifteen leagues in length from north to south, and twelve in breadth from east to west. It stands out from the mainland one hundred eighty miles, right opposite the river called Gabon. The chief port-town of São Tomé lies in the northerly part of the island, directly under the equinoctial line.
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