Being now without our mast or our yards, we made a small mast out of the stump which was left us of the old one, by nailing a piece of a spar to it, and made a yard for a mainsail out of another spar, and so on. But all this was so patched up and weak that a very slight wind would have been enough to carry it all away.
All this happened so swiftly, and amidst scenes of such chaos, that I had scarce any time to reflect on the sad mutilation of our lovely little pinnace, nor on the perils that were mounting about us. But we had some respite after a time, the wind relenting a little; and while we worked, we exclaimed on the turns of fate, that had had us so rich with cargo at one moment, and wondering at the next if we would survive at all. But that is the true life of the sea.
They came round with rum for us as we worked. The man who gave me mine was Caldeira de Rodrigues, and I leaned close and looked him eye to eye and said, “What now, duke’s son? Is there not some force striving to repay you for your crime?”
“Keep your voice low.”
“Ah, you still worry about your skin! Well, and I think we may all be swimming, before long. Finish your rounds, and go you and ask Jesus for forgiveness.”
He gave me a cold look and said, “When this is done, I will have your life from you, Englishman.”
“Ah, indeed, I brought the storm to cause you inconvenience, is that it? Go to, scoundrel: anger me enough and I’ll send you over the side, and then, I think, the storm will abate! But look at the injury we have suffered for you!”
He moved away, fearing I meant my words, which to some degree I did. But worse injury was coming. For now we were helpless in the sea, though we had cobbled together masts and sails of a sort; and we were being driven onward, and night was coming, and who knew what shoals might rise from the sea to harry us? I went to my charts, but they gave me little news. We were still many leagues out to sea, but these were tropic waters, often shallow where one least expected it, and the charts were sketchy, and there was no pilot alive who knew all these waters, least of all me, so hastily impressed into my office.
Darkness fell. The wind seemed more quiet, and the sea a little still. We talked of the repairs we would make in the morning, and the resumption of our voyage. Some men went to their berths. I remained on watch, with Faleiro the master, and Pinto Cabral. Then the wind rose again, and the sea began to foam, and in the very pit of the night we heard suddenly the terrible sound of the waves breaking on nearby rocks. Then, for our sins and by God’s equable and hidden judgment, the Infanta Beatriz that we had no way of controlling did run upon a shoal.
“We are lost!” cried Cabral, and I thought he might well be right.
When the ship struck, it gave three great frightful knocks, and at once the bottom of the vessel was cast up above the water because of the extreme roughness of those submerged rocks. I heard the sound of shattering timbers, an awful grinding and splitting sound, and felt the spume and spray pour over me.
The most evil aspect of this wreck was that it befell by night, in such darkness that we could scarce see one another. Men came rushing from the depths of the pinnace, crying out in fear and confusion, for they faced death in the roaring seas with no knowing where safety might lie. The breaking up of the ship, the cracking of the wood which was all being ground to splinters, the falling of masts and spars, made so hideous a clatter and noise that it fair to burst our brains.
Then came another flaring of that rainless lightning, which gave me a moment’s vision of our surroundings. We were flung up upon rocks that jutted partly from the sea at this tide, though by the sliming and seaweed of them I could see that within some hours they would be wholly submerged. By a second flash of God’s bolt I managed to jump to the nearest of these rocks, and cling to it; and by a third I looked back and saw that though the ship was altogether destroyed, the longboat of her still was intact.
We were thirty or forty men, though, and the longboat would hold perhaps a dozen, and we were some leagues yet from the shore. I turned to gather men to salvage wood for rafts, and stumbled over a figure who lay upon the rocks, groaning: a mariner who had been flung free of the ship in the wreck, doubtless. As I groped for him in the darkness, to which now my eyes were growing a little used, a wave splashed us both, and he began to drift away, and in another moment would have been lost in the night. Though my own life was at risk by so doing, I slipped into the water and, swimming with the greatest difficulty in my heavy boots, did make after him, and catch him by a leg, and draw him in my arms toward the shoal. The lightning came again, and told me that this was Pinto Cabral I had saved, which pleased me, Cabral being a good man. It might just as readily have been Caldeira de Rodrigues for whom I had risked my life, and I was not so fine a Christian that I would have cared to do such a thing.
“The ship is in danger,” Cabral did murmur, coming awake now that he breathed air instead of water.
“The ship is entirely destroyed,” said I. “But the boat survives. Come, put your arm over my shoulder.” And, slipping and sliding upon the sharp rough slimy rocks, we found our way back upon the broken decks. I saw some men striving to lower the boat, and others crowding about it, fighting to get on. There was no sight of Faleiro, which left me in command, as pilot. At once I rushed to the ones who struggled, and cried, “Are you mad? If you all enter the boat, it will go down, and all of you with it! Hold back, let us consider. We are safe here, for the moment.”
Yet did they continue to fight like mad wolves to enter the boat. I seized them one by one, and hurled them back, calling upon them to regain their wisdom, and I took some hard blows as I fought to help them keep their lives. But then Faleiro appeared, with a great bloody bruise on his forehead, and stood beside me, and together we were able to bring order.
Though the wind still howled and the sea raged like a ravenous beast, we kept command and took stock of our situation. It seemed that some eight or nine men were dead: some killed in the breakup of the ship, which lay impaled and sundered upon the shoal in the saddest way, and others thrown free like Cabral, and swept off into the night before they could be aided. The others clung to the sides of the boat and we waited for morning. The waves broke very fierce over the reef and fell off at once with great violence to the south-east, in which direction the sea appeared to be running.
In the last hours of darkness there were many tears, and signs of contrition and repentance for sins. I heard them at their litanies and rituals, and asking for God’s mercy, which I also did in my own English words. Some waved crucifixes on high, or pictures of the Virgin, and in great weeping asked her to save their souls, for they thought their lives were doomed. But by first light we saw there was some hope. We found the ship’s ropes, and out of the planking of the deck commenced the construction of some small rafts, a task that took us less time than I thought it would. Now the storm was gone away, and the day was hot and fair. What was most sad was that the ship was burst open, and some of the vast elephanto teeth were strewn upon the shoal like match-sticks, and our fine fabrics and other good articles of trade; and the rest of the cargo was in the water, beyond all salvaging. Yet were we still alive, most of us, and for that we gave thanks.
When the rafts were built, Faleiro looked to me and said, “Well, Piloto, and can you lead us to shore?”
“I will do my best,” said I. “Come, let us take the tide while it is running high, and leave this place at once.”
It was agreed that I was to ride in the longboat, since that I was the pilot and must not be lost. Faleiro would command one raft, and Pinto Cabral another, and the third, that was the largest, would be led by a man named Duarte Figueira, who had shown great coolness and strength in the wreck.
The others drew lots, for who was to have the safety of the longboat. Nine were chosen, and they did rejoice greatly, with a kind of crazy jubilation. Also did we stock the boat with such things as we could rescue from the ship, weapons and ropes and tools, but not much. Of food-stores we had scarce any. The tide was now at its f
ullest, and the shoal was altogether submerged, which freed the rafts and boats, and let us get away: and a good thing, too, for at that moment a great wave came up, and split the ruined Infanta Beatriz in sunder, so that the two halves of her fell off and were swiftly carried down, leaving only some part of her hull that was impaled on the rocks.
At the last moment there occurred something that would return to trouble me sorely in after times. For the wave did sweep Cabral’s raft close alongside our longboat, and suddenly Tristão Caldeira de Rodrigues, that had a place on the raft, did stand up, looking like a madman with that purple mark of his ablaze on his face, and cried out that he did not intend to die in an uncovered raft that was at the mercy of the sea.
I saw him making ready to jump into the longboat, which was overfull as it was.
“Nay, you may not!” I shouted. “You will swamp us!”
But he was already in mid-leap. We could not have him with us, for we would all be lost. Though Caldeira de Rodrigues was a man of slight build, he carried a sack in his arms, doubtless containing things that in his greed he had saved from the ship, and from the look of his effort it was of great weight. His lunatic leaping would up-end us for sure.
So I did not hesitate. It was no mark of my dislike of him, that which I did: I would have done the same had it been Cabral, or Faleiro, or anyone else, for we could not afford the loss of the longboat. I seized the handle of my oar, and as he sprang through the air I rammed him hard in the belly with it, and thrust him back toward the raft.
He hung in mid-air for a moment like one suspended by a rope, which was a fate I think he richly deserved. His eyes were round with amaze, his mouth was gaping, his birthmark flashed like a beacon-light. Then he fell and dropped beneath the waves, still clutching that sack of his. The longboat, at the same time, tipped far to the side and shipped some water, but righted itself in a moment. I looked down, and thought I saw a glimpse of Caldeira de Rodrigues, and waited for him to bob to the surface. But he did not. Mayhap my blow had knocked the wind from him and stunned him, yet even so he should have floated up in a little time. I think, though, that he held his sack in such a deathly grip that he would not release it, and the weight of it drew him downward and drowned him.
“You will suffer for that if ever we see São Paulo de Loanda again,” said a man at my elbow. “His brother is certain to have vengeance.”
With a shrug I made reply, “I will face that problem when the time for it comes. If he had reached the longboat, we would all be in the water now with him.”
“Aye,” said another. “There is truth in that.”
We waited a moment or three more, but there was no sign of him. I believe I do know what was in that fatal sack: for I suspect that when he agreed to return his stolen booty to the graveyard, he did keep some of it back without my knowing, and carried it upon the Infanta Beatriz, and had it safe in his arms during the wreck, and it was that stuff, so precious, that carried him down to his death. Well, and a proper death it was, if so be the case: for I think it was the curse on the grave-robber that brought the storm onto us, and caused the loss of our ship and all its treasure, and took the lives of some innocent men.
FOUR
AND SUCH was the piteous end of our joyous and prosperous voyage to Loango. Now, under a cloudless and merciless sky that gave us no surcease from the terrible hammer of the tropic sun, we made our way landward in our distress. But some worse horrors even were yet awaiting us.
By God’s great mercy, the wind was out of the west, and not an evil one, and we rowed our boat and poled our rafts in brisk order. Soon the shore was clear in view. From the look of it, and my memory of the coast as we went northward, we were perhaps midway between Loango and the mouth of the Zaire, and how we ever would get back to São Paulo de Loanda I did not know. But I gave that question little heed: sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof.
Though we managed to remain in close formation most of the journey, the raft commanded by Duarte Figueira veered somewhat to the northward as we neared the land, and, try as he might, he could not make headway back nigh to us. At the time that seemed of little consequence, for we thought we could reunite on the shore: but in fact that separation of his raft from us led to a sore and tragic calamity in a little while.
The current now ran swiftly north-easterly, and our rowing and poling were no longer of avail. We were simply swept up and carried toward the shore, and had no say in our going, and merely prayed that we would not be cast up on some fanged rocks. Nor did that befall us, for when we were close we saw that the shore here was flat and sandy, with a good many little spits and islands and peninsulas of low stature, the product of some inner river, much like the isle of Loanda in the harbor of São Paulo de Loanda. So we glided to an easy landing, the longboat and Faleiro’s raft and Cabral’s at one such spit, and Figueira’s at another, with perhaps three hundred yards of open water separating him from us. We unloaded our pitiful little goods, and cried out to them, “Come over! Let us all be together!” But when they attempted to pole their raft to our place, they could not achieve it: the water was too shallow, and the pole became mired as it were in a quicksand. And when they tried to come about to us from the landward end, it was the same thing. The landward side of their spit was all muck, and they could not pass.
So there we were in two parties, come to land on a pair of sandy spits that jutted out like the two prongs of the letter V from the true shore, with shallow open water between them, and impassable swamp at the inner end. Well, and we could rest awhile, I thought, and then return to our rowing, and move on along the coast to some more hospitable place.
Meanwhile we foraged on our little spit for anything that might be useful to us, for we had salvaged not much in the way of edible stuffs from the wreck. Some flagons of wine, a bit of cheese, some quince jelly, some waterlogged bread: that was about the whole of it, and it would not last two days.
“What do you find?” I asked Cabral and Faleiro, when we came together from our foraging.
Their faces were dark. “Small serpents,” said Cabral. “A kind of rat. Some crabs.”
“And a few sprigs of bush,” said Faleiro, “with no fruit upon them.”
“Well, then we will be eating snakeskins and toasted bones before long,” Cabral said, making a smile on it, though we all knew it was no jest but the truth.
“And after that,” said I, “we will be eating one another.”
“Ah, and are you a Jaqqa, to say such a thing?” Faleiro demanded sourly.
“God forbid,” said I. “Let us take our lives, before it come to that!”
Yet sometimes in jest the most frightful things are foretold.
We made a melancholy cold meal, and wandered our little kingdom, and waited for night, and slept poorly, and waited for morning. And morning, when it came, revealed a monstrous thing. For although it had not been possible for us to reach the land by crossing the quicksand, certain folk had been able to come the other way, at least on the adjoining point where Figueira and his seven or eight companions were. I was looking idly out to sea, and dreaming of a vessel that would come to rescue us, when Cabral grasped my arm most fierce and cried, “Look! Across the way!”
“Jesu preserve us,” I said.
For a demonic band of dark naked figures now surrounded our companions on the other spit. Like revelers out of Hell had come some dozens of long-legged graceful men, who pranced and capered in a weird dance, throwing out their arms and legs with evident glee, and circling round and round.
“Mother of God!” said Faleiro, in a voice like that of one who is being garroted. “They are Jaqqas!”
And so they were, and now a true nightmare unfolded before our eyes, nor could we wake from it, but must witness every grisly ghastly moment.
How the man-eaters had come out onto the point, God alone can say. Perhaps they knew some path through the quicksanded pitfalls, or else they had come swimming up from the other side, or in boats: I never knew, I c
annot tell you now. But they were there, and as our hapless shipmates knelt and prayed most fervently, the cannibals fell upon them, one by one slitting their throats.
We could do nothing. Our only weapons were knives and swords, that were of no use at such a distance.
“Blood of the saints!” roared one grizzled old Portugal of our band. “We must save them!” And he went struggling out into the water, brandishing a blade in each hand; but he got no more than a dozen yards, and found himself mired up to the knees, and it was all he could do to return to shore. At which the Jaqqas looked up from their slaughter, and gestured mockingly to us, and laughed, and called out as though to say, “Wait ye your turn there, and we will come and have you next!”
And so we watched. And cursed, and raved, and shook our fists, and were utterly helpless.
Our friends were entirely slain. Figueira himself was the last, a tall and noble-looking man of silvered hair, who called upon Heaven to avenge him, and then the long knives went into him. And after the killing came worse, the butchery and the cooking. God’s truth, it was a terrible sight, much more grievous than that other cannibal feast I had witnessed long ago in Brazil, for these were men I knew by name, that had only just survived a dread ordeal by sea, and did not merit such a fate as the next thing. From scraps of wood and old dried seaweeds and the like the Jaqqas did build a fire, and cut our men into several parts, some three or five of them, and roasted them before our eyes, and sat crosslegged in a merry way, gnawing at haunches. God’s death! I was thankful only that some hundreds of yards of open water separated us from them, not so much that it gave us safety, but that we did not see that dread feasting at any closer range. For it was vile enough, at that distance.