To the Indies Read Free

of the Holy Name , his breeches in his hand, and with the sunset lowering round him, he felt a twinge of lonely fear.
     
    And at that very moment a little wind began to blow. He felt it first on his bare legs, damp with the water that had dripped from his shirt — a tiny coolness, the merest ghost of a breath. At first the coolness was all he noticed, never thinking of the cause. Then the big sail above him flapped a trifle, and then louder. Alonso Sanchez de Carvajal, the sailing master, was on his feet now on the poop, looking round at the sea and the sky, and up at the long red-cross pennant which was stirring itself at the masthead. He bellowed orders, and at the sound of his voice the sailors bestirred themselves, rousing themselves up from where they lounged on the decks, moving to halliards and braces with more cheerfulness than they had been accustomed to show during the last few days. The yards were braced round and the sails bellied a little to the wind. Already the motion of the Holy Name had changed, from the indolent indifferent lurching to a more purposeful swoop. Rich heard a sound he had forgotten — the musical bubbling of water under the bows. In itself that was enough to rouse him from his depression. He could feel his spirits rise as he hopped on one leg trying to pull on his breeches and not impede the sailors in their duties.
     
    There was the Admiral on the poop now, in his blue satin doublet with the gold chain glittering round his neck, his white hair hanging to his shoulders. He, too, was looking round the horizon. Now he was speaking to Carvajal, and Carvajal was bellowing more orders to the crew. The yards were being braced farther round. They were altering course; Rich looked forward as the ship steadied herself. Right ahead the sun hovered close above the horizon in a glory of red and gold. The Holy Name was heading due west — the Admiral must have changed his mind at last about holding to the southwestward. To the westward probably lay the nearest land; Rich felt a little thrill of anticipation.
     
    Alonso Perez came shambling past him — the Admiral’s servant, major-domo and general factotum, stoop-shouldered and with arms disproportionately long. He stepped to the rail and cleared his throat noisily, standing waiting.
     
    “Go!” came the Admiral’s high clear voice from the poop, and Perez spat into the indigo sea.
     
    The Admiral was by the rail on the poop, the fingers of his right hand clasping his left wrist. He was counting the number of times his pulse beat while the white fleck of mucus drifted back to him, which would enable him to estimate the speed of the ship through the water. Rich had helped in the initial tedious calculations by which the table of speeds had been constructed — for example: If the ship travels XCI feet while the pulse beats XLIII times, and the number of times the pulse beats in a minute is LXX, how many leagues does the ship travel in an hour? But there was no need to make those calculations now, because the table was constructed once for all, and a mere knowledge of the number of pulse-beats enabled anyone to read off the speed of the ship; and Carvajal’s pulse, and the pulse of Diego Osorio the boatswain, had been compared with the Admiral’s so that any one of the three could take an observation.
     
    It was highly ingenious — one of the many highly ingenious devices which Rich had admired since he had come to sea and interested himself in navigation. The astrolabe, which enabled one to guess which point one had reached of the earth’s rotundity from north to south, was another ingenious device. By its aid a ship’s captain could always return to a place he had previously visited, if only he sailed long enough along the line which ran through it parallel to the equinoctial line. If only — Rich was beginning again, as he had often done before, to try to work out a similar method of ascertaining longitude, but he was interrupted by his