The Earthly Paradise

  ‘They like caps equally as much as hawk’s bells,’ said the Admiral to Rich. ‘In that they are more like the cannibal Indians of Dominica than those of Espanola. That is what one would expect.’

  The longboat, rowed as fast as a dozen stout arms could drive her, had returned now from the Santa Anna, and Alamo reported himself to the Admiral. He looked at the string of pearls which the Admiral gave him for inspection.

  ‘They are pearls undoubtedly,’ he said, feeling their texture with his lips. He shaded them from the sun with his body to see their lustre. ‘Yet they are different from the pearls of the Orient. Their tinge and lustre are not the same.’

  ‘Are they valuable?’ demanded the Admiral.

  ‘Oh, yes. Half their value has disappeared because of the clumsy way in which they have been bored, but I would give you a good price for them in the Calle del Paradis. As rarities, even if for no other reason, they would stand high. And there are some good specimens here, too. These two match well and are of superb lustre. A queen could have no better ear-drops.’

  ‘And what of this gold?’

  Alamo took the fragment of metal, poised it on a finger-tip, tested it against his teeth, turned it to obtain a flash of the sun from it.

  ‘That is gold,’ he said. ‘Without my acids and scales I cannot assay it, but I am certain it is pure and virgin. It contains no base metal, in other words, and it is in a state of nature, as it was found.’

  ‘And where would that be?’

  Alamo shrugged.

  ‘In the bed of a stream, most likely. Or in sand or loam close to a stream. Gold found in the heart of a rock is never in pieces as large as this.’

  ‘Thank you. Now speak to these men in the tongues of the East.’

  Alamo addressed the Indians in a language of which Rich understood no word. Nor did the Indians, to judge by the blankness of their expressions. Alamo tried again, this time in Arabic with which Rich was faintly familiar, but without result. He spoke to them in Greek, of which Rich had a working knowledge, and then again in a language faintly reminiscent of Arabic to Rich. The Indians’ faces remained impassive.

  ‘That is Hebrew, Greek, the Arabic of the East and the Arabic of the West, Your Excellency,’ said Alamo.

  ‘Thank you. We can let them go now,’ said the Admiral.

  He took more caps, and set one on the head of each Indian. He pressed a hawk’s bell into each of their hands, and then he waved them over the side to where their canoe, gunwale deep, floated at the end of a line.

  ‘Go in peace,’ he said, as they still stood awestruck at the magnificence of the presents pressed upon them. He drew one by the wrist to the ship’s side to make his meaning plain. They slid down the line into the water-logged canoe; one of the women took hold of a big shell tied to the gunwale and with it began to scoop the water swiftly out--it was obvious that they were perfectly accustomed to having their cranky craft capsized. The line was cast off, and the men took the paddles. Slowly the canoe stood away from the ship, heading in for the land. The scarlet caps danced over the water, bright in the light of the setting sun. The Indians never looked back; Rich, watching their course, saw the canoe turn abruptly aside in fright, like a shying horse, from the caravels as the big sails were trimmed to the wind again.

  ‘With kind treatment and presents,’ said the Admiral, coming to stand beside Rich, ‘we can hope that they will tell their fellows and send them to us. We need pearls and we need gold.’

  Not merely for any mad scheme for reconquering the Holy Land either, thought Rich. He knew how precarious was the Admiral’s hold on the Royal favour, despite the presence of his two sons-one of them a bastard, too--as pages at court.

  ‘We have made a start,’ he said, cheerfully.

  ‘So we have,’ said the Admiral; in his two fists was the long string of pearls, luminous in the failing light.

  5

  In the lavender dawn next morning, when the ships had hardly gathered way after lying-to all night, the look-out cried that he saw more land. It was a low peak on their port bow; to starboard the southern coast of the island of Trinidad terminated in a similar peak, with a narrow strait between, towards which the easterly breeze was briskly pushing them. The Admiral came with his limping step to see for himself. He gave two hurried orders, hailing the caravels himself, in his high voice, as they converged upon the Holy Name towards the strait. Rich did not understand at the time all that happened next. He saw the anchors let go and the sails got in, and the longboat manned to go up the strait and take soundings, but before the boat could cast off the sailors in the ships were running and shouting with excitement. The anchors were not holding on the rocky bottom, there was a fierce current running here of which they could have no knowledge until they tried to stop, and the wind was still pushing briskly against hulls and rigging. Stern first, and with anchors dragging helplessly, the ships were moving fast towards the unknown passage-a fact which Rich found it hard to realize at the time, and of the danger of it all he was quite unconscious.

  He saw the Santa Anna lurch as her anchor caught, saw her cable part, and saw her swing round and race them on their course towards the strait. The rocks to the right, all a-boil with surf, seemed to be coming nearer, dangerously near. The Admiral was shouting orders; Osorio was running forward with an axe, and the Admiral himself was hounding the panicky sailors up the shrouds. The cable was cut, the mainsail dropped. High and clear the Admiral’s voice called to the steersman. Over went the tiller. For a few more harrowing seconds the ship, nearly aback, hesitated; they could hear the surf on the rocks. Then slowly she turned and gathered way. She lurched in a sudden boil of current, and a moment after she was running free, as if nothing had happened at all, on a sea mirror-smooth, with the rocks far astern and the land already far distant on either hand.

  The Admiral was smiling as he returned from setting the men to work at preparing the spare anchor and cable.

  ‘Sailors are ignorant and superstitious,’ he said, limping up to Rich. ‘On seas where no Christian has ever sailed before I suppose it is excusable. When they found that anchors did not hold and that we were in the grip of a current they imagined all sorts of things. They thought we were near Sinbad’s loadstone mountain, being dragged by the attraction of our iron. Or they thought we had reached the edge of the world and were about to slide off. They thought of everything, in fact, except the need for getting the ship under control again.’

  ‘You thought of that, Your Excellency,’ said Rich. The incident confirmed what he knew well enough already, that the Admiral was a first-rate seaman with a clear head for any emergency.

  ‘That is thanks to the Blessed Virgin,’ said the Admiral, simply and devoutly. ‘She has never deserted me. Not even in worse perils than that. But that was a strange current between those islands.’

  He shaded his eyes from the sun and looked back at the perilous passage.

  ‘So it appears,’ said Rich.

  ‘The caravels are safe. They were nearer the centre of the strait. It was well that we hove-to last night,’ commented the Admiral, half to himself. ‘I shall call the new land the Isle of Grace. And the strait must have a name, too, for my chart. The Serpent’s Mouth!’

  ‘Your Excellency is ingenious at devising names. But of course you have had much practice.’

  The Admiral flushed a little at the compliment. He smiled confidently, and made a deprecating gesture with his hand; the smile almost became a grin.

  ‘Even of the devising of names one can grow tired,’ he said. ‘And the places must have names. To me they are each distinct enough, but in my letters to Their Highnesses I must have something by which to call them.’

  At that human moment Rich felt himself to be more in sympathy with, and fonder of, the Admiral than he had ever been before. He must have been in this mood at the time when he made his famous demonstration with the egg. The Admiral showed in a far better light as a practical seaman and as a man of the world than as a hi
ghfalutin theorist. But one at least of his theories-that there was a route to the Indies across the ocean-had most certainly been proved correct.

  ‘I could wish,’ said the Admiral,’ that we should see more Indians. We need to trade. And we shall need labour for the mines.’

  He called a request to Carvajal, and the Holy Name headed once more towards the coast of Trinidad, a seaman at the lead to ascertain the safe limit of their approach. The land was tantalizingly just too far away for close observation.

  ‘Might I--’ began Rich, and then he hesitated, surprised at himself, before he took the plunge. ‘Might I take the longboat closer in to shore?’

  ‘I would be glad if you did,’ said the Admiral. ‘You must take every possible opportunity to be able to report favourably to Their Highnesses on the wealth of these islands.’

  Rich had no time to repent. It was a surprisingly short interval before he found himself in the sternsheets of the longboat, indubitably invested with his first command at sea, and experiencing a tremor of fearful excitement in consequence. The old sailor Jorge sat at the tiller beside him, two more sailors were at the sheet, and forward there sat five gentlemen of coat-armour, glad of the opportunity of escaping for a while from the confinement of the ship and ready in consequence to acquiesce in the command with which the Admiral had tacitly invested him. Rodrigo Acevedo was one of them, however-there was a hint of a smile in his handsome swarthy face as he met Rich’s eye, which told Rich that Acevedo was aware of the inner doubts which were troubling him.

  The wind was off the land, blowing briskly enough, and the boat lay over gaily on her side as they headed parallel to the shore, the sailors handling sheet and tiller deftly as they translated Rich’s vague directions into action. The coast curved here in a wide bay, shelving so gradually that even the longboat had to keep two hundred yards from the beach, and everywhere the monotonous green vegetation came down to the very water’s edge-green, eternally green. There were irregularly shaped hills in the background, but never a sign of a clearing, no hint of smoke to betray the habitation of man. The wind blew more briskly yet, and the sky was overcast, yet it was stifling hot. As Rich stirred uncomfortably in his seat he felt the sweat trickling in the folds of his clothes. A rainstorm changed the colour of the hills from green to grey; it came drifting towards them over the grey sea. Soon it was upon them-they heard the hiss of the drops upon the water as it approached. The first drops rang sharply on the helmet which Rich wore-he had discarded his armour-but immediately the distinctive sound was blurred in his ears by the roar of the rain beating everywhere about them. Entirely exposed as they were, they could neither think nor see. The rain fell in cataracts, blotting out both ships and shore from view, soaking them and dazing them as it drove into their faces.

  Rich was still unconscious of Jorge moving beside him. He was still attending to his duties, presumably by touch and instinct, and his example diverted Rich from his first instinct to order the longboat to run back for shelter to the ship. Rich set his teeth; he would not be the first to give in. As captain, even though it was only of a longboat, it was his duty to make no complaint about the conditions, and the thought of Rodrigo Acevedo’s earlier amused tolerance acted as a new stimulant. It was worth suffering discomfort if the hidalgos-hijos de alguna, sons of somebody-had to share it. They might be better swordsmen than he, better horsemen; they might think of him as a pot-bellied little lawyer, but sitting in the rain was a thing anyone could do without either practice or grandfathers. He wiped the rain out of his eyes to peer at the five gentlemen huddled in mute discomfort in the bows, and grinned to himself and settled down to endure.

  For an hour they crept along through the downpour, and then, when the rain had almost killed the wind, it stopped as suddenly as it began. Within a few seconds the sun was shining in all its majesty, and the wind, hot and sticky, had almost died away. Rich stood up to wring the water from his clothes; the thwarts steamed in the glaring sunlight. There was no change in the appearance of the shore-the hills may have grown a little loftier, but they were still, clothed in their eternal green. He scanned the coast carefully, and looked to seaward, where the Holy Name, in all the glory of her coloured sails and ensigns, preceded the two caravels on her slow northerly course. Only then did he pay any attention to the group in the bows, and, even so, he waited for them to speak first.

  ‘God, what rain!’ said Bernardo de Tarpia. His hair hung lank over his cheeks, his trim beard was a mere ludicrous wisp. The water trickled out of the skirts of his coat as he stood up.

  ‘What of the food?’ asked Cristobal Garcia. ‘I suppose the bread is no better than a pudding.’

  ‘No, gentlemen,’ explained Jorge. ‘It is a tarred sack in which it is kept.’

  ‘It is hard to decide,’ said Garcia, ‘whether a flavour of tar is preferable to rain water.’

  ‘Tar or no tar,’ interrupted Rich, fumbling in his pocket, ‘I mean to dine today on fresh fish, newly broiled.’

  ‘Fresh fish!’ exclaimed Garcia.

  ‘That is what I said,’ said Rich, demurely. ‘It will be odd if we cannot catch enough for our dinners here.’

  The little bundle he produced from his pocket contained lines and hooks; he felt a gratified glow as he heard the delighted exclamations of his crew. He thought of the other contents of his chest in the ‘tweendecks in the Holy Name-his anxiety during the three weeks between his deciding to join the expedition and its sailing had at least stimulated him into wondering what might be of most use in the New World, and he had stocked his chest accordingly. These penniless younger sons, their heads full of battles and gold mines, had done nothing of the sort.

  He doled out lines and hooks; a biscuit from the bag was crumbled into a paste for bait.

  ‘Please God,’ said Garcia, piously, ‘that the fish here like the flavour of weevils.’

  With shortened sail, before the faint air, the longboat crept slowly over the glassy sea. The gentlemen fished as enthusiastically as the seamen; it was amusing to note how they cheered up at the thought offish for dinner, and how earnestly they plunged into the business. Two months of weevilly biscuits, of stinking dried cod and of boiled barley porridge and stale olives made the prospect of fresh fish ineffably attractive. But Rich could guess how they would round on him, their tempers sharpened by disappointment, if no fish were caught. He bent his head secretly and prayed earnestly to Saint Peter--he had prayed to Saint Peter for good fortune in fishing often before, on pleasant outings in the roadstead of Barcelona, but this time there was an edge to his prayer. He wanted desperately to catch fish.

  Saint Peter was kind. They caught fish in plenty while the wind died away to nothing. They landed and built a fire and toasted their fish on sticks before it-not very efficiently. Rich wondered secretly to himself what comment these young men would have made if in their father’s houses they had been served with fish half charred and half raw, but here, stretching their legs on land for the first time for months, and in the blessed shade at the edge of the sand, they ate with gusto, and with only moderate curses for the mosquitoes which bit them. Rich could see a new light in their eyes when, full fed and comfortable, they regarded him now. There was a faint respect for him as a giver of good things; he sat with his back against a tree and his helmet on the ground beside him and felt happier than he had done for months.

  The ships still lay becalmed on the blue, blue seas under the glaring sun.

  ‘We can explore for a little while,’ he announced. ‘Who’ll come with me?’

  They all wanted to, seamen and gentlemen both, looking eagerly to him for orders.

  ‘Two men must guard the boat,’ decided Rich. ‘Will anyone volunteer? Then you must stay, Jorge. And you, Don Diego. Come on, you others.’

  As they plunged into the forest Rich decided to himself, remembering the disappointment in the eyes of those left behind, that the hardest task of a man in command was the arbitrary allotting of distasteful duty. He was glad he had
not hesitated, but had given his orders instantly without allowing time for argument. He was conscious that he was learning fast.

  The forest was dense and nearly impenetrable; in places they had to hack a path through it with their heavy swords, for the gurgling watercourse they followed was too small to allow easy passage along it. They sweltered in the stagnant air, plunging knee deep into slime and rotting vegetation. Gaudy birds clattered among the branches over their heads. Bernardo de Tarpia uttered a sudden sharp cry, slashing with his sword-a red and black snake coiled and writhed at his feet. It was a lucky blow which had taken off its head before it could strike; they had all of them heard stories, of those red and black snakes of the Indies and the death they could inflict. A huge goggling lizard ran frantically among the branches away from them. Then they saw monkeys, scurrying among the tree-tops for all the world like mice on the floor of a barn. They laughed at their antics and the monkeys chattered down at them in reply.

  ‘There is everything here save the Grand Khan and the mines of Ophir,’ said Rodrigo de Acevedo in an undertone to Rich, but Rich would not allow himself to be drawn; he could not enter into a discussion of that sort while in a position of responsibility.

  And at this place where they had stopped for a moment there seemed, for the first time, to be a possibility of humans near them. There might almost be a path through the undergrowth here, nearly imperceptible, probably only a wild beast run. Rich looked up at the sky; there was a wisp of cloud there which was quite stationary-in the absence of wind they could continue the exploration without fear of being parted from the Holy Name.

  ‘Follow me quietly,’ he said to the others, and he turned his steps up the path, his sword in his hand.

  But they could not hope to move quietly in the forest. Dead wood crackled under their feet, low twigs rang on their helmets, their scabbards rattled and their accoutrements creaked. There was precious little hope, Rich realized, of ever surprising a party of Indians in this fashion, especially after he stumbled and fell full length. As he picked himself up someone came running down the path and stopped and looked at them--it was a little Indian boy, naked and potbellied. He put his fingers in his mouth and stared, the sunlight through the branches making strange markings on his brown skin. His features began to work, and it was clearly only a matter of seconds before he started to cry.