by Anthology
What more can I say? We made our doleful way back to Puerto Rico, and told our tale of Crusaders and Indians and cool blue waters. But we were met with laughter, and there were no purchasers for the contents of our casks, and our fortunes were greatly depleted. All praise be to God, I survived that dark time and went on afterward to join the magnificent Hernando Cortés in his conquest of the land of Mexico, which today is called New Spain, and in the fullness of time I returned to my native province of Valladolid with much gold in my possession, and here I live in health and vigor to this day.
Often do I think of the isle of Florida and those Christian Indians we found there. It is fifty years since that time. In those fifty years the cacique and his people have rendered most of Florida into Christians by now, as we now know, and I tell you what is not generally known, that this expansion of their nation was brought about the better to support their Crusade against the Mussulman once the ships that Don Juan Ponce promised them had arrived.
So there is a great warlike Christian kingdom in Florida today, filling all that land and spreading over into adjacent isles, against which we men of Spain so far have struggled in vain as we attempt to extend our sway to those regions. I think it was poor Don Juan Ponce de León, in his innocent quest for a miraculous Fountain, who without intending it caused them to become so fierce, by making them a promise which he could not fulfill, and leaving them thinking that they had been betrayed by false Christians. Better that they had remained forever in the isolation in which they lived when we found them, singing the Gloria and the Credo and the Sanctus, and waiting with Christian patience for the promised ships that are to take them to the reconquest of the Holy Land. But those ships did not come; and they see us now as traitors and enemies.
I often think also of the valiant Don Juan Ponce, and his quest for the wondrous Fountain. Was the Blue Spring indeed the Fountain of legend? I am not sure of that. It may be that those Indians misunderstood what Pedro de Plasencia was requesting of them, and that they were simply offering us baptism—us, good Christians all our lives! —when what we sought was something quite different from that.
But if the Fountain was truly the one we sought, I feel great sorrow and pity for Don Juan Ponce. For though he drank of its waters, he died too soon to know of its effects. Whereas here ram, soon to be ninety years old, and the father of a boy of seven and a girl of five.
Was it the Fountain’s virtue that has given me so long and robust a life, or have I simply enjoyed the favor of God? How can I say? Whichever it is, I am grateful; and if ever there is peace between us and the people of the isle of Florida, and you should find yourself in the vicinity of that place, you could do worse, I think, than to drink of that Blue Spring, which will do you no harm and may perhaps bring you great benefit. If by chance you go to that place, seek out the Indians of the village nearby, and tell them that old Francisco de Ortega remembers them, and cherishes the memory, and more than once has said a Mass in their praise despite all the troubles they have caused his countrymen, for he knows that they are the last defenders of the Holy Land against the paynim infidels.
This is my story, and the story of Don Juan Ponce de León and the miraculous Fountain, which the ignorant call the Fountain of Youth, and of the Christian Indians of Florida who yearn to free the Holy Land. You may wonder about the veracity of these things, but I beg you, have no doubt on that score. All that I have told you is true. For I was there. I saw and heard everything.
THE ROUND-EYED BARBARIANS
L. Sprague de Camp
Ho Youwen, General of the Advanced Imperial Eastern Force, to the esteemed Li Ganjing, Director of the Eastern Continent Section of the Barbarian Relations Bureau of the External Affairs Department of the Overseas Branch of His Imperial Majesty’s government. Health, prosperity, and many sons!
Dear old friend: This person thinks that, besides his formal report on the affair of the round-eyed barbarians, which will follow in the next dispatch, you would also like a personal letter to furnish background for this turn on events. It is all very well for officials of the Upper Mandarinate to sneer at barbarian thoughts and deeds as of no interest to representatives of mighty Zhongguo. (*In the Pinyin transcription of Chinese, zh stands for the sound of the j in journal.) True, barbarians’ customs are often strange and disgusting, their beliefs outlandish, their manners appalling, and their emotions childish. But to be realistic, barbarous tribes and nations also include many dangerously vigorous and ingenious people. It was just such a toplofty attitude that in the days of the Sung led to the Mongol plague and the subjection of civilization to the rule of barbarian hordes for a century.
The same shortsightedness threatened a century ago, when Zhengtung was the Son of Heaven. A cabal of scholars and soldiers sought to end the voyages of exploration and tribute gathering begun by the great Zheng Ho. These misguided persons sought to stop all foreign contacts. They held that, since the Middle Kingdom had everything needed by civilization, such contacts would only have adverse effects.
Luckily the cabal was defeated; the work of exploration and of scientific development initiated under the accursed Mongols was continued. Hence the exploration and conquest of this Eastern Continent has proceeded in an orderly manner. The red-skinned barbarians, realizing the futility of opposing the advance of civilization with weapons of wood and stone, have been offered the benefits of our superior culture. Many take advantage of this opportunity and, in another few centuries, may have raised themselves almost to the level of civilized human beings.
But to return to the round-eyed barbarians. One day this summer, this person was reconnoitering the eastern side of the Lower Mountains, in an area not yet brought under the benevolent sway of the Son of Heaven. I led a company of Hitchiti infantry, armed with our new breech-loading rifles. A scout reported the approach of a force of redskin warriors of the Ochuse tribe, who dwell on the shores of the great water to the south. Signal drums and gongs alerted my detachment.
A shi later this force debouched from the trail. First came a scattering of redskins, from their paint evidently the Ochuse. After them rode a horseman in a steel helmet, cuirass, and other pieces of plate armor.
After him came hundreds of round-eyed men afoot, less impressively armored, in the garb of Yuropian barbarians, wherewith the voyages of Admiral Xing have familiarized us. Their loins were covered with short, bulging breeches, below which they either went bare-legged or wore a kind of skintight trouser on each leg. They bore pikes, crossbows, and firearms of primitive types, obsolete in the Celestial Empire for a century. My redskin spies had warned me of the incursions of such people along the coast of this continent, but these were the first such intruders whom I had personally seen.
Behind them, threading their way through the forest, I glimpsed many other redskins, men and women bowed beneath the weight of the burdens they bore. Farther back yet, barely visible amid the towering trees, came a troop of armored horsemen and other men leading unsaddled horses.
At the sight of my group, taking cover behind rocks, bushes, and hummocks, the newcomers halted. The armored man in the lead swung of his horse with a clank of armor and handed the reins to another round-eye, who led the animal to the rear. The armored round-eye was handed a pole, and another man afoot joined him in front of the array. This was a lean man in a long black robe; through my telescope I saw that he was clean-shaven.
The armored man drove the butt of his pole into the soil. From the upper end of this pole hung a flag; but since the day was still, there was no wind to flutter this banner. All I could see was that it bore a pattern of red and yellow.
The armored man then shouted in his native gibberish. Through my telescope I saw that he was of medium size, with a sun-browned skin, sharp, beak-nosed features, and a full black beard. This, I perceived, must be one of those round-eyed barbarians inhabiting the Far Western Peninsula, called Yuropa by its natives, of which Admiral Xing informed us on his return from those lands in the reign of Hung Wu.
The other round-eyes crowded up behind him.
When the armored man finished his proclamation, the other round-eye, the black-robed one, raised his hands and uttered another unintelligible speech. I called to the scout Falaya nearby: “O scout, you know the Ochuse tongue. Find out what this be all about!”
Falaya stood up and shouted in the tongue of the coastal redskins. Presently one of the Ochuse conferred with the armored man and shouted back. This translating back and forth, as you can imagine, proved a lengthy, tedious business. Mankind were better off if all men spake the tongue of Zhongguo, which is after all the speech of civilization. At length Falaya turned to me, saying in broken Zhongguo: “O General, he say man in armor say he claim all this land in name of his king, Felipe of Espanya.”
Somewhat astonished, I told Falaya: “Ask this bold fellow, who claims lands belonging to the Son of Heaven, who he be?”
After the usual pause for translation from Zhongguo to Ochuse and from Ochuse to the armored man’s Yuropian dialect, the reply came back: “He say he Captain Tristan de Luna y Arellano, and who be we?”
This person gave Falaya the needed information, adding: “And by whose leave, barbarian, do you trespass on the lands of the Son of Heaven and, moreover, claim parts of it in the name of some tribal chieftain in the Far Western Peninsula?”
I know not how literally my words were translated, but they seemed to arouse the armored round-eye to a frenzy. He began to shout a reply; but the black-robed one laid a hand on his arm. I could not hear what they said at that distance—not that I could have understood their blather anyway. But black-robe seemed to be urging negotiation.
At last the armored round-eye fell silent and signaled black-robe to speak. The result, translated sentence by sentence, was a lengthy homily. It reminded me of the endless sermons of that loquacious bonze, Brother Xiao-jin, whom we sent home last year. He could put a hungry tiger to sleep with his endless disquisitions on the wisdom of the compassionate Buddha.
This fellow, the black-robed one, advanced an astonishing claim: that his master, a Yuropian high priest called a papa, had divided the world between two Yuropian rulers, the kings of Espanya and Portugar; and this part had gone to the King of Espanya. There was more, about how the Yuropian god had commanded all men to love one another; and if we would but accept his theological doctrines, we were all assured of endless bliss in his Yuropian Heaven. If we refused to swallow these myths, we should all be slain by the Yuropians’ weapons and then suffer eternal torment in the Yuropian Hell, a fearsome afterworld reminding me of the more eccentric afterlife concepts of the Tibetan Buddhists.
Although this person knows better than to laugh under such serious circumstances, I could not suppress a burst of mirth. I sent back the message that his papa seemed very free in giving away other peoples’ countries and that in any case all men came naturally under the dominion of the Son of Heaven.
As for his theology, I was satisfied that I must have done something right in a previous incarnation to have earned my present rank as a reward. I would try by correct action and keeping my karma clean at least to maintain this status, compared to which round-eyed barbarians were less than worms beneath my feet. They must have committed grave offenses in previous lives to have been born into such a lowly estate.
At this the armored man altogether lost control of himself and screamed orders. His redskins spread out to the flanks, nocking their arrows, whilst a couple of hundred other round-eyes formed a double line facing us and readying their primitive firearms. These operated by means of lengths of cord, treated to burn slowly; I have seen specimens of similar weapons in the Imperial War Museum.
One round-eye passed down the line with a bucket of glowing coals, wherein each of the invaders dipped the end of his cord until it was alight. Then he clamped it to the mechanism of his gun. Meanwhile those armed with crossbows cocked them. The leader shouted some more, and my scout reported: “He say we surrender or die, sir!”
I replied with a vulgarism expressing my disdain for such primitive insolence. The armored man shouted again, whereupon the other round-eyes discharged their weapons. After the first rank had fired and begun the lengthy business of reloading, the second rank stepped forth between them and fired in their turn. On their flanks, the redskins shot arrows.
The guns made loud reports and tremendous puffs of smoke, whilst their musket balls and crossbow bolts whistled past us. Since my people were well under cover, and those of the second rank had fired blindly because of the curtain of smoke before them, we sustained no casualties save a few flesh wounds among my Hitchiti from the arrows.
When the pall of smoke had somewhat dissipated, I said: “Fire!” Our rifles opened up, and a number of trespassers, both round-eyed and red-skinned, fell.
“Reload!” I said, and then: “Fire!”
The round-eyes were still struggling to reload, which with firearms of that archaic type is a protracted process. As I later learned, such a gunner does well to get off twenty shots in one ko, whereas a well-trained soldier can fire one of our breech-loaders a hundred times in that interval, if he run not out of cartridges.
At our third volley, the intruders’ redskins fled. Half the round-eyes were down; but the leader was still erect, shouting commands and defiance. I told the captain of my force: “Choose a sharpshooter and order him to wound that armored man in the leg. I wish him alive, and also a redskin who can speak his language.”
So it was done. At the fall of the leader, the other round-eyes joined the redskins in flight: first a few here and there, then all of them. Some dropped their guns to run faster. Behind them the redskin porters also dropped their loads and fled, while the horsemen cantered off with their armor jingling. I did not command a pursuit, knowing that in these forests of immense trees the pursued can easily slip away and the pursuer as easily get lost. My Hitchiti broke from cover and raced away to collect the scalps of the fallen foes.
Later, when I had donned my official robe instead of my filthy uniform, and my peacock-feather hat in place of the steel cap, I commanded that the wounded Yuropian leader be brought to my tent, along with his redskin interpreter and our own Ochuse-speaking/scout. I also sent men to retrieve the baggage dropped by the fleeing porters.
This Tristan de Luna appeared at the entrance to my tent with a pair of my redskins gripping his arms. His armor had been shed, and his garb was ordinary Yuropian, with the puffed trunks and below them the skintight trousers of their kind. He sweated heavily in the heat, limped on his bandaged leg, and supported himself by a tree branch he had somehow obtained, whittled down to a walking stick.
Now that I had a closer look at the man, I saw that he was older than I had thought. His curly black hair and beard were, like mine, beginning to show gray. But his stance was still erect and his movements youthfully springy, save for his wounded leg.
As he neared, I became aware that the man had not bathed lately, if ever. Not to put too fine a point on it, he stank. I then attributed this to the exigencies of travel, but my redskin spies inform me that this is usual with Yuropians. Not only have they a naturally stronger bodily odor than normal folk; but also the Yuropian religion discourages cleanliness. Most adhere to Christianity, whereas the other major western creeds, Islam and Judaism, value bathing and cleanliness. Christians suspected of going over to either of these other faiths are burned alive, as the more warlike redskin tribes do to captive foes. Therefore among Christians cleanliness arouses suspicion of conversion to one of those other cults, which are completely outlawed in Espanya.
At the entrance Captain Tristan wrenched loose an arm, placed his hand over his heart, and made a low bow. This gesture, evidently meant as a polite greeting, overbalanced him in his crippled state. He staggered and would have fallen had not the two redskins caught him. He did not go to his knees and touch his forehead to the carpet, but one must make allowances for barbarians who have never been taught civilized manners; the full ko-tou would have been difficult for hi
m in any way.
At least this barbarian had evidently decided on a more urbane approach. His translated words were: “Sir, now that I perceive you more closely, it appears that you come from the Great Khan of Cathay. Be this true?”
Yuropians had evidently not kept up with events in the Middle Kingdom. I told Tristan: “Two centuries past, your impression might have been apt. But we sons of Han expelled the Khans long ago and restored the Celestial Empire to the proper Sons of Heaven, now reigning as the glorious Ming. The Khans were but barbarian usurpers from the Gobi. Whence came you?”
He said: “From the land that the deceased Captain Ponce discovered and named la Florida. He thought it an island, but unbroken land appears to extend far to the north thereof, and also to the west to Mexico.” After a pause he continued: “Then be we in truth in the Indes? When that Italian Colón returned from his voyages, half a century ago, he insisted that he had reached them, or at least come to a chain of islands to the east of them, whence another day’s sail would have brought him to the Spice Islands.
“But a ship of that fellow Magallanes returned to Espanya thirty-odd years ago. The captain thereof, Delcano, asserted that far to the west of these lands lies an ocean so vast as to require three or four months to sail across, and that the lands of the Great Khan lie beyond it. But this Delcano was a Basque and therefore not to be implicitly trusted. If this be the true Indes, that were greatly to the advantage of my sovran.”
I told him: “Your Captain Delcano is quite correct. In any case, the Eastern Continent whereon we now stand is wide enough to take a well-mounted man, with remounts, as long to ride across as your Magallanes found the Eastern Ocean. It has nought to do with the land of India, which is even farther than the Celestial Empire. And now, what is all this nonsense about claiming this land for some Yuropian chieftain?”