To the Indies Read Free Page B

to join those already on deck. Twelve of them were set to work at bailing out the ship — seven of them as a living chain passing up buckets from the bilge to the rail, and five returning the empty buckets again. It was a slow and weary process, which Rich had watched daily for five weeks, and every day the work was harder, because in these seas there lived creatures who bored holes in the bottoms of ships, as clean as an auger.
     
    Rich had dallied with several ideas bearing on the subject, both to reduce the labor of bailing and to evade the necessity for it. There was the Archimedean screw, about which he had read in an Arabic mathematical treatise. A single man turning a handle might do more with such an apparatus — if it could be set up in a ship — than twelve men with buckets. Or there were pumps about which he had vaguely heard — the Netherlanders and Frisians were using them to drain their drowned fields. Here, too, they might be worked by the force of the wind and keep the ship dry without any labor at all. And if the marine creatures bored through wood, why not protect the wood from them? A thin coating of lead, say, or of copper. . . . Perhaps the weight would be too great for the ship to bear, and certainly the cost would be enormous, but it might be worth while thinking about.
     
    It would be no use discussing such innovations with Carvajal, as he was painfully aware. Nor — Rich decided reluctantly — with the Admiral. The latter regarded him with suspicion, as a royal agent sent to try and devise methods of entrenching upon his cherished privileges as ‘Viceroy of the Ocean’, and in that he was not far wrong. Where he was wrong was in seeing traps laid for him in the most innocent suggestions, such as that of copper-bottoming ships. The Admiral was in such a state of mind as to believe every man’s hand against him.
     
    The ship was fully awake now. Here came the friars in their robes, and after them Rich’s recent cabin mates, the hidalgos, lounging out on deck, their swords at their hips; the two Acevedo brothers, Cristobal García and his followers, Bernardo de Tarpia, still a little unsure of himself from seasickness, and the others. Their lisping Castilian contrasted oddly with the rougher, aspirated Andalusian of the crews and with the sweet Catalan which was music to Rich’s ears. João de Setubal spoke the barbarous Portuguese, which put him on better terms with the Admiral, who spoke Portuguese well, but who, when he spoke Castilian, was liable to lapse with startling unintelligibility into his native Italian. When that happened it was not unusual for him to go on talking for several minutes without realizing what had happened, and for him to be recalled to Spanish only by the look of blank incomprehension on the face of the person addressed.
     
    Here he came on deck now, wearing scarlet velvet — the fact that he could wear velvet in that heat was clear enough proof of the way in which personal discomfort meant nothing to him — his gold chain and his jeweled sword and dagger. His four pages followed him — it was as if they were carrying a five-yard ermine train — and Perez with his white staff of office, and Antonio Spallanzani, his Italian squire. The hidalgos, Rich among them, fell into line and bowed deeply as he approached, with all the deference due to the Regent of the Indies. He bowed stiffly in return — it was rheumatism which made him so unbending — and then turned, with head bowed and uncovered, to murmur a prayer to the Virgin by the taffrail. Carvajal awaited his attention at his elbow, and the Admiral, when he had finished his devotions, turned to him with a slow dignity. Carvajal made his report on the night’s run, the Admiral’s keen blue eyes running over the slate to confirm it. They had run twenty-one leagues. Two great shooting stars had been seen during the middle watch. At dawn the lookout had seen a flight of pelicans . . .
     
    “Then land is