Lord of Darkness

  He clapped his hands and two slaves appeared to clear the table—blacks of some other region of Africa, with flat noses and lips like fillets of beef. One had the ill fortune to stumble and splash some drops of an oily yellow sauce on Don João’s garment, staining it, and with a single smooth unthinking motion Don João scooped up a pewter boat holding another sauce, a fiery hot one, and dashed it across the slave’s face and into his eyes, so that the poor brute cried out and covered his face with his hands and dropped to the floor, rolling over and over and sobbing. Don João spurned him with his foot, pushing him aside, and the slave, crawling on his knees, scuttled from the room, for all I know blinded, or at the least in mighty pain. So it is with these Portugals. Don João was in truth a man of sympathy and compassion and all of that, civilized and humane, maybe the best of all his kind, but even he, for a few spots on his sleeve, would deal out a terrible agony to a fellow creature. It was a useful lesson to me, not that I really needed it, in the complexity of human nature, that I should see Don João as a superior being of great merit, and that he should in reality be quite far from perfection. But perhaps that is a lesson in the simplicity of human nature, namely, my own, that I should have expected total goodness in a Portugal. The unhappy slave might at least be grateful that he did not serve a Spaniard; for then his master might have had him flayed, or worse, for those small flecks of grease.

  TEN

  AND THEN did I take up the honorable and exalted trade of ocean-going pilot, the finest of all maritime professions, which my father had mastered in his twelve years of Trinity House, and which my late brother Thomas also had attained. It humbled me to be following in their path without having undergone their long and strenuous licentiate period, and it struck me as hugely ironical that I would do my piloting for Portugals instead of for the Queen.

  But I had no fear of doing it badly and disgracing all the Battells of time past and time to come. Don João had said it himself, that I am clever and learn things quickly. I mean no immodesty, but it is true. And also I was then no novice at sea, having made a voyage from England to Brazil, and one from Brazil to Africa, along with many lesser ones in the seas of Europe, even as far as Muscovy, and I had not made those voyages with my eyes closed. Finally I had already had one taste of piloting, when I sailed Governor Serrão’s pinnace down the Kwanza from Masanganu to São Paulo de Loanda, and though that is not the same as going out into the Atlantic, still, it calls for some skill.

  What is it, this craft of piloting, that I value so high?

  It is nothing less than the heart of navigation: the art of guiding vessels from one place to another when land or navigational marks are in sight.

  I do not mean to scorn the science of navigating in the open sea, which is the province of the ship’s master, unless master and pilot be combined in one individual. That is called grand navigation, and it is no trifling aspect of seamanship. A Magellan or a Columbus or, supremely, a Drake who points his bow into unknown seas is scarce to be mocked.

  And yet, I must say, what is grand navigation once one is out in the great waters, except the doing of the same task day after day, that is, keeping the wind to one’s back and the deck above the waves, and seeing to it that you sail toward sunset if westering is your aim, and the other way if you would go the other way? Whereas the pilot—ah, the pilot must cope with a thousand thousand perils, and have every science at his command to prevent disaster, and his task is full of intricacies in every moment.

  Mind you, the pilot does not have land constantly in sight. The prudent seaman does not often choose to keep close inshore—there are too many dangers and mysteries there—but rather prefers to take himself to deeper waters, beyond what we call the kenning, which is the distance at which the coast is visible from the masthead. But it is the pilot’s duty to sight capes and headlands often enough to be sure of his vessel’s position. Where the territory is well known, he has his rutter or portolano to tell him of the points he must watch for: his book of charts, compiled by generations of his predecessors, marking each promontory, each island, each snag or speck that is a landmark to him. And where he sails an unknown coast he must use his wits to learn the landmarks, and use his instruments when no landmarks are ready at hand for him.

  So we feel our way, with compass and lead, with cross-staff and quadrant, with astrolabe and plumb-bob. We strive never to veer dangerously close ashore, nor to let ourselves be driven perilously far to sea. We must know the winds and the stars and the messages of the clouds.

  There is more. A time comes in the voyage when landfall must be made; and then there are new pothers, for the pilot must deal in shoals and reefs, in tides, in sudden bores and currents. The moon rules the tides and the pilot must then live by the moon in her phases, or risk running his ship aground and running himself to the land of simpletons. So it was a sizable assignment that Don João was offering me, made doubly difficult in that I had never seen these African waters before—unskilled pilot bluffing his way in unfamiliar seas!—and triply difficult for having as my companions a crew of Portugals who had no reason to love or respect me or to share with me such knowledge of the route as they might themselves have.

  The pinnace I was given was the Infanta Beatriz, a larger vessel than the one I had had on the river, perhaps seventy or eighty tons. Perhaps it was more of a caravel than a pinnace, in fact, for it had three masts, including one little one at the stern-castle, and her sails were lateens, that would let her run before the wind and also go near it, that is, sail with a side wind. But in addition there was some mongrel arrangement for square-rigging her on the fore-mast, if need be.

  They let me go aboard her to make examination and grow familiar with her. For to a mariner a new ship is much like a new woman, that needs a little getting used to. All women have the same parts, in more or less the same places; but yet they differ in size and shape and in their workings, and even an expert saddleman takes a few moments to learn the way of her. With a ship even more so. The hull is below and the masts overhead, but there are many varieties of placement within that arrangement, and one must seek out and know ahead of time the details of sails and spars and spirits, shrouds and tacklings, braces and stays, ratlines and cables, and all of that. So I wandered about, discovering the Infanta Beatriz. She was tight and sturdy, a handy ship, promising ease of sailing. There was a cabin for me in the poop, though small, and for my guidance I had some instruments and also various books of tables, old and much water-stained but still useful: an ephemerides, an almanac, a table of tides, and a rutter-book. Not one of these gave the complete information of the coast, yet each held a part, and by employing them all and the protection of God besides I thought I would be able to find my way up the coast the first time. After that I should be able to manage it less hesitantly.

  The crew was a smallish one. The master, who was my superior officer and had command of all and responsibility for the cargo, was one Pedro Faleiro, who seemed to me weak-willed and short-tempered, but not evil. Of others we had a carpenter and a caulker and a cooper, a gunner, a boatswain, a quartermaster, and a company of ordinary seamen, all roguish and lame-spirited, that struck me very different from English sailors in all respects. Yet they seemed to know one rope from another, which was all I would ask of them. I think I would not have cared to cross the ocean with such men, but a journey of fifty or one hundred leagues up the coast and back was a different matter.

  Though I was English and not a Papist, they were outwardly friendly to me, and Faleiro and some others invited me to take the Mass with them on the eve of sailing. “Nay,” I said, “it is not my custom,” and their faces clouded, but only for an instant, and they let me be. So off they went to their Romish mysteries, their swallowing of wafers and guzzling of wine, that is, their eating of the body of Jesus and the drinking of His blood, as they themselves will admit to believing they are doing.

  I would not have minded some word or two of God’s blessing myself before putting to sea. But there hap
pen not to be any chapels of the Anglican rite in this part of Africa, and I saw no value to me in the Latin ceremony, which is not a conduit for the divine power but rather an impediment to it. Instead I went off apart by myself and looked toward the sky, and said within my soul, “Lord, I am Andrew Battell Thy servant, and I have fallen into a strange fate, which no doubt Thou had good reason for sending upon me. I will do Thy bidding in all things and I look to Thee to preserve me and to keep my body from peril and my soul from corruption. Amen.”

  I remember that prayer well, because I had many other occasions afterward to use it, as my African years lengthened and the dangers that menaced me grew ever more horrific. And I think it is a useful prayer. I do believe that if one turns directly to the Lord and speaks openly and plainly to Him, that it is a thousand thousand times more effective than any telling of beads and lighting of candles and muttering of Pater Nosters and Ave Marias and kneelings and grovelings before some priest in fine brilliant robes and majestic pomp.

  When I had done praying I returned to my dark cell in the presidio; for, though I was no longer under guard, they had not given me any prettier quarters. A place in the town would be ready for me when I returned from my voyage, they said. (There was no need to guard me now. They knew I would not flee. Where could I go? How? I could not swim to England.)

  Soon after, Dona Teresa came to me. She wore a dark cloak and a veil across her lovely face.

  “You see I keep my word,” she said.

  “I am most grateful.”

  “Don João spoke of you warmly, and with great praise. He says you are a man of skill and strength and shrewdness, and that in your blunt way you have a kind of diplomacy, and that you are altogether commendable.”

  “Aye, that I am.”

  “And you are possessed of great modesty, too.”

  “Aye, Dona Teresa! I am famous for it, and rightly so.”

  “You have other gifts, too, for which you could be famous also, but Don João knows nothing of those.”

  “Nay,” I said. “I told him, as we sat over our wine and our hog-fish stew, how many times I had enjoyed your body, and how admirably I had tupped you, and what sounds of extreme pleasure I was able to bring from your lips. And he gave me congratulation, saying that he had sweated like a Dutchman over you without achieving your ecstasy, and he wondered if I had any secret of it that I could impart to him. So thereupon I said—”

  “Andres!”

  “—that it was simple, that one need only put one’s mouth close to your left ear—”

  “Andres!”

  “—and speak to you in English, saying certain inflammatory words such as ‘cheese’ and ‘butter’ and ‘tankard’, and upon hearing those words you went into such frenzy that it took all of a man’s vigor to ride you without being thrown, and—”

  “I pray you, stop this!” she cried, holding in her laughter but letting some giggles escape.

  “—and straightaway you would reach your summit of pleasure, from merely the sound of some English. So Don João thanked me and commanded me to instruct him in my language, which I have done, and when he seeks your body next you will, I think, hear him speak some of the fine old words of English at intimate moments, whispering to you, ‘cobweb’ and ‘cutlery’ and such like. And I advise you, Dona Teresa, to respond with much movement of your hips and thrusting of your middle and gasping and moaning deep in your throat, or else it will give me the lie, and I will lose standing and prestige with your Don João.”

  “You are a very foolish man,” she said fondly.

  “I am set free after long months of prisonhood, and I think it has softened my brain with excitement.”

  “Will you speak to me in English?”

  “An’ it please you, I would speak to you in Polack, or in the language of the Turk.”

  “Speak in English.”

  “I am thy faithful servant and highest admirer,” I said in English, with a bow and a grand flourish.

  “Nay,” she said, “not yet, not yet! Whisper these things in my ear, as you said, when we are intimates!”

  “Ah. Surely.”

  She unwound the veil and laid bare her elegant face, which more and more seemed to me to have some hidden blackamoor beauty in its features—that fullness of the lips, that breadth and height of the cheekbones. And then with a similar gesture she doffed her cloak, pivoting and whirling while unshipping the small catch that clasped it at her throat, and I saw that beneath the cloak was nothing at all except the supple nakedness of Teresa, her breasts swaying and tolling like bell-clappers in bells, her thighs glowing darkly in the dark shine of my cell. And at that sight so suddenly revealed I felt an access of joy that all but had me shouting out an hurrah. She came to me and I stroked and rubbed her with my eager hands and felt her beginning to writhe beneath my touch, most especially when I put my fingers to that plump tight-haired mound at her belly’s base. She made hissing sounds and spoke to me in words I did not know, but which I think must have been of the Kongo tongue that was native to her mother’s grandmother, and as I went into her her eyes rolled as those of one transported. The keenness and wildness of her passions were almost frightening. We went at it with right regal fury, and I could not help but give play to my wit, which hearkened back to our foolery with words, and at one moment of delight I put my lips beside her ear and murmured such English words as “stonemason” and “turnip-greens” and “scavenger,” the first that came to my mind.

  Which made her shriek with crazy laughter and pound my back with her hand in a fair savage way, and down below I felt her squeeze me tight, in that style of having a little fist concealed in there that some very passionate women have, and she cried, “Ah, Andres, how I do love you, Andres!”

  And with the using of that word “love” a chill passed over me in all my overheatedness. For I thought of Anne Katherine. I had taken care not to do that for quite some long time, but now she came rushing into my guilty soul. I told myself that these are deep waters indeed that I sail, if Teresa and I have taken up with the light sports of word-play, that are the mark of lovers, and that has carried us onward to talk of loving. For mere coupling like rutty cats in a foreign land is one thing, which may be forgivable when lust overtakes one’s chastity, but love is quite another, and perilous.

  Then I told myself what I should have thought at the first: that oftentimes people speak of love when their bodies are entwined, and it is a human thing, a failing of the moment. One always loves the person who is giving one’s body extreme pleasure—at least at the instant such pleasure is being administered—but that is not the same thing as the love that bonds man and woman across the decades. Or so I told myself.

  And put the question from my mind, and had my pleasure in good hard hot pulsing spurts, and fell gasping over Dona Teresa. And we lay quiet a long while, until she rose and recloaked herself and went from my cell, wishing me a bon voyage.

  ELEVEN

  THE NEXT day we sailed. I thought my piloting would be put to the test at the very first, in the finding of our way out of the harbor of São Paulo de Loanda, through all the shoals and shallows. But there was no need. The crewmen knew the road across the Bay of Goats, and did it without my instruction, following the buoys and marks and taking us past the tip of the isle of Loanda and into the open sea.

  Yet I marked well what they did; for another time I might have to find the way of my own.

  There was some challenge soon after, as we beat our way northward. Not far north of São Paulo de Loanda a river reaches the sea that has several names, the Mbengu or the Nzenza, which the Portugals choose to call the Mondego. Under whatever name it roils the waters with its outflow, and had to be gone around with care, which we did, and then it was straight sailing.

  Shortly I discovered that my apprehensions of difficulty in my new trade were for nothing. It was a fair sea and we had no great journey to make, only fifty leagues to the mighty river of Kongo, that the Portugal call Zaire. That is their wa
y of speaking a native word, nzari, which has the meaning simply of “the great river,” and a great river it is, one of the greatest, I trow, in all the world. To reach it we sailed with land-winds pushing us, creeping still all along the coast, and every day we cast anchor in some safe place either behind a point or in a good haven. There were a few small tasks of decision to make as we journeyed, but on the whole I think a child could have done the piloting, and it gave me no high opinion of the Portugals of Angola to think they had waited this voyage until they had a captive Englishman to read their charts for them. Oh, I did some gaping and some squinting, and I came out with my astrolabe and looked most solemn, and measured stars with my cross-staff very gravely, and from time to time fed my compass needle with my lodestone to renew its magnetism. And took some soundings, and did my timekeeping, and had things done with tacks and sheets and bowlines, and all of that. I wanted the Portugals to prize me highly.

  The place of our going was an island in the mouth of the River Zaire, which in my orders from Don João de Mendoça was called the Ilha das Calabaças, that is, Calabash Island. When I looked to my charts, meaning to find the outermost of the isles of the estuary, that island was marked, Ilheo dos Cavallos Marinhos, which means Hippopotamus Island. I asked Pedro Faleiro about this, saying, “I will find any island I am asked to find, but you had better keep your names more orderly.”

  Faleiro smiled. “They are the same place, Calabashes or Hippopotamuses. We have a town there, where we do our trading.”