I dealt with this story in my novel The Island of the Day Before, so allow me to quote one passage since, after all, on such uncertain information, this is the only document that suggests what must have occurred.
Finally one morning, taking advantage of a sailor’s bad fall from a yardarm, which fractured his skull, while there was great confusion on the deck and the doctor was summoned to treat the unfortunate man, Roberto slipped down into the hold. Almost groping, he managed to find the right path. Perhaps it was luck, or perhaps the animal was whimpering more than usual that morning: Roberto, more or less at the point where later on the Daphne he would find the kegs of aqua vitae, was confronted by a horrid sight. Well shielded from curious eyes, in an enclosure made to his measure, on a bed of rags, lay a dog.
He was perhaps of good breed, but his suffering and hunger had reduced him to mere skin and bones. And yet his tormentors showed their intention to keep him alive: they had provided him with abundant food and water, including food surely not canine, subtracted from the passengers’ rations. He was lying on one side, head limp, tongue lolling. On that exposed side gaped a broad and horrible wound. At once fresh and gangrenous, it revealed a pair of great pinkish lips, and in the centre, as along the entire gash, was a purulent secretion resembling whey. Roberto realized that the wound looked as it did because the hand of a chirurgeon, rather than sew the lips together, had deliberately kept them parted and open, attaching them to the outer hide.
Bastard offspring of the medical art, that wound had not only been inflicted but wickedly treated so it would not form a scar and the dog would continue suffering—who knows for how long. Further, Roberto saw in and around the wound a crystalline residue, as if a doctor (yes, a doctor, so cruelly expert!) every day sprinkled an irritant salt there.
Helpless, Roberto stroked the wretch, now whimpering softly. He asked himself what he could do to help, but at a heavier touch, the dog’s suffering increased. Moreover, Roberto’s own pity was giving way to a sense of victory. There was no doubt: this was Dr. Byrd’s secret, the mysterious cargo taken aboard in London.
From what Roberto had seen, from what a man with his knowledge could infer, the dog had been wounded in England, and Byrd was making sure he would remain wounded. Someone in London, every day at the same, agreed hour, did something to the guilty weapon, or to a cloth steeped in the animal’s blood, provoking a reaction, perhaps of relief, but perhaps of still greater pain, for Dr. Byrd himself had said that the Weapon Salve could also harm.
Thus on the Amaryllis they could know at a given moment what time it was in Europe. And knowing the hour of their transitory position, they were able to calculate the meridian! (translated by William Weaver)
If the story about the dog seems fanciful, in the same novel I described an instrument proposed by Galileo in a letter of 1637 (to Lorenzo Realio). Galileo thought of fixing longitude by observing the positions of Jupiter’s satellites. But once again, on a ship at the mercy of the waves, it would be difficult to point the telescope accurately. And here Galileo suggested an extraordinary solution. To enjoy its comedy, we need not read the humorous account in my novel—it is enough to read Galileo himself:
As for the first problem, this is certainly the most difficult, but I think I have found a remedy for this, at least for the ordinary movements of the ship; and this should be enough since, during great storms and tempests, which normally prevent the sun and other stars being seen, all other observations cease, as indeed do all mariner’s duties. But during ordinary movements I think it is possible to reduce the state of the person who has to make the observations to a tranquility similar to that of the peace and calm of the sea; and to achieve this benefit I have thought of placing the observer in a specially prepared part of the boat so that he does not feel either the movements from bow to stern or the rocking from side to side: and my thinking is based on this.
If the ship is always in calm waters and without waves, there is no doubt that the use of the telescope would be just as easy as on land. Now, I want to place the observer in a small boat placed inside the large boat, the small boat being in such necessary quantity of water as I will explain below. Here, first of all, it is clear that the water contained in the small vessel will remain in equilibrium, even when the large boat inclines and reclines to right and left, forward and backward, without any part of it being raised or lowered, but will always remain parallel to the horizon; so that if in this small boat we build another smaller boat, floating in the water contained within it, it would find itself in an extremely calm sea, and would therefore stay there without moving: and this second boat is the place where the observer must be placed. I therefore want the first vessel, which has to contain the water, to be like a large semi-spherical basin, and that the smaller vessel is similar to it, except that it is smaller, and that the space between its convex surface and the concave inner surface of the container is no more than the thickness of a thumb; so that a very small quantity of water will be enough to float the inner vessel, as if it were floating in the wide ocean . . .
The size of these vessels must be such that the inner and smaller vessel can hold the weight of the person making the observations without sinking, as well as his chair and the other equipment on which the telescope is fixed. And in order to keep the smaller vessel separate from the outer one so as not to touch it, so that it cannot be influenced by the motion of the ship in the same way that the larger one is, I want the internal concave surface of the inner vessel to be held with several springs, eight or ten in number, which stop the two vessels from touching each other, but do not prevent the inner vessel from not responding to the raising and lowering of the sides of the outer container: and if, rather than water, we wish to use oil, that would be even better, nor would the quantity be great, since two or three barrels would be enough . . .
I have already made a kind of curved helmet on the same principle, for the use of our galleys, which, when placed on the head of the observer, and a telescope being placed upon it, adjusted in such a way that it was always directed towards the same point at which the other free eye was looking, without doing anything else, the object that he was looking at with his free eye was always to be found through the telescope. A similar machine could be built which is not just held on the head but over the shoulders and bust of the observer, on which is fixed a telescope of the size necessary to clearly distinguish the stars of Jupiter.
In order to resolve the problem—with all due respect to Galileo, whose extraordinary invention no one had the courage to finance, and to the whole plethora of inventors of other extraordinary methods for fixing longitude—we had to wait for Harrison’s invention of the marine chronometer, or rather, his final version in the 1770s. From then on, even during storms, the clock would keep the correct time for the point of departure. But before that moment the insulae were fatally perditae.
Before then, the history of Pacific exploration is the history of people forever discovering lands they were not looking for. Abel Tasman, for example, while searching for the Solomon Islands in 1643, arrives at Tasmania (which is forty-two degrees latitude farther south, as if that were nothing), sees New Zealand, passes Tonga, arrives in Fiji without disembarking, where he sees only a few small islands, and reaches the coast of New Guinea, without realizing that inside that loop he had made stood Australia. No mean achievement. He had gone from point to point like a billiard ball, and for many years after, other navigators came extremely close to Australia without seeing it.
In short, it was a madcap voyage between islands, coral reefs, and continents, without any apparent plan. And poor them. We can set a course today using the maps created after Cook, but they were all basically wandering about like Captain Bligh, in a ship’s launch, heading toward the Moluccas, and the most important thing was not to bump into the Bounty again.
But even after the problem of longitude had been solved, it was still easy for ships to lose themselves among such islands. Look at the voyages of Corto Maltese and Rasputin in Ballad of the Salt Sea. The characters in the Ballad are avid readers. At one point, Pandora seems to be happily immersed in the
