No doubt he had wounded himself with his own sword. Instead of thinking of the wound, he went back to the woodpile and searched breathlessly among the logs for his weapon, which was stained with blood. He carried it to the aftercastle and poured aqua vitae on the blade. But finding no improvement, he abjured all the principles of his science and poured the liquor directly on his arm. He invoked some saints with excessive familiarity, ran outside where a great downpour was beginning, at which the cranes flew off and vanished. The downpour brought him to; he became worried about his clocks, ran here and there to carry them to shelter. He caught his foot in a hatchway, sprained it, hopped back inside on one leg, crane-like, undressed and—his response to all these meaningless events —set to writing while the rain first grew heavier, then abated. Some hours of sunshine returned, and finally night fell.
And it is good for us that he did write, for we are thus able to learn what happened to him on the Amaryllis and what he discovered in the course of that voyage.
CHAPTER 19, A New Voyage Round the World
THE AMARYLLIS SAILED from Holland and called briefly at London. There, one night, it furtively took something on board, while the sailors formed a cordon between the deck and the hold, so Roberto was unable to see what the new cargo was. Then the ship sailed due southwest.
With amusement Roberto describes the company he found on board. It seemed the captain had taken the greatest care to choose wool-gatherers and eccentrics for his passengers, to serve as a pretext at departure, with no concern if he then lost them along the way. They fell into three categories: those who thought the ship would sail westwards, like the Galician couple who wanted to join a son in Brazil, or the old Jew who had made a vow to go to Jerusalem in pilgrimage by the longest route; those who as yet had no clear idea as to the extension of the globe, like some scapegrace youths determined to make their fortunes in the Moluccas, which they could have reached more comfortably by way of the Levant; and finally those who had been blatantly deceived, like the group of heretics from the Piedmont valleys who meant to join the English Puritans on the northern coast of the New World and did not know that, in fact, the ship would head straight south, making its next call at Recife. Before the heretics became aware of the fraud, they arrived at that colony—then in Dutch hands—and agreed to be put ashore, in any case, at this Protestant port, fearing even worse trouble later among the Catholic Portuguese. At Recife the ship took on a Knight of Malta with the face of a freebooter, whose aim was to find an island some Venetian had told him of: it had been christened Escondida, he did not know its position, and no one else on the Amaryllis had ever heard the name. The captain apparently knew how to pick his passengers.
Nor was anyone else concerned about the well-being of that little company packed below deck: while they were crossing the Atlantic, there had been no shortage of food, and some provisions were acquired on the American shores. But, after sailing among long tufted clouds and an azure sky beyond the Fretum Magellanicum, almost all the passengers, except the privileged guests of rank, for at least two months had drunk water that caused the staggers and eaten tack that stank of rat piss. And some men of the crew, as well as many passengers, died of scurvy.
In search of supplies, the ship sailed up the coast of Chile to the west and anchored at a desert island which the nautical charts called Más Afuera. They stayed there three days. The climate was salubrious and the vegetation luxuriant, inspiring the Knight of Malta to say it would be a great stroke of luck to be shipwrecked one day on those shores, and to live there happily, with no wish to return to one’s native land—and he tried to persuade himself that this was Escondida. Escondida or not, if I had remained there —Roberto told himself on the Daphne—now I would not be here, afraid of an Intruder whose footprint I saw in the hold.
Later there were contrary winds, the captain said, and the ship, against all reason, turned northwards. Roberto had felt no contrary winds, quite the opposite: when the change of course was announced, the ship had been proceeding under full sail, and thus it had to come hard about. Probably Dr. Byrd and his men needed to proceed along the same meridian to perform their experiments. The fact is that they reached the Galópegos Islands, where they amused themselves turning huge turtles on their backs, then cooking them in their shells. The Maltese consulted certain maps of his at length and decided that this was not Escondida.
Resuming their westward course, descending below the twenty-fifthdegree latitude south, they replenished their water at an island of which the maps gave no indication. It offered no attractive features beyond its solitude, but the Knight—who could not bear the food on board and harbored a strong aversion to the captain—said to Roberto how beautiful it would be if a small band of good men, brave and reckless, would take possession of the ship, put the captain and any who wanted to stay with him in the longboat, burn the Amaryllis, and settle on that land, far from every known world, to build a new society. Roberto asked him if this was Escondida; the man shook his head sadly.
Proceeding again northwest, abetted by the favoring Trades, they came upon a group of islands inhabited by savages with amber-colored skin, with whom they exchanged gifts, taking part in their merry festivities, animated by maidens who danced with the movements of the grasses that swayed on the beach almost at the water’s edge. The Knight, who had taken no vow of chastity, on the pretext of drawing portraits of some of those creatures (and he was an artist of some skill), certainly had occasion to have carnal congress with them. The crew wanted to do the same, so the captain moved forward the ship’s departure. The Knight hesitated about staying behind; spending his days sketching here seemed to him a splendid way to conclude his life. But then he decided this was not Escondida.
Afterwards they again headed northwest and found an island with quite docile indigenes. In the two days and two nights they stayed there, the Knight of Malta took to telling stories: he told them in a dialect not even Roberto could understand, still less the natives, but the speaker assisted himself by drawing in the sand, and he gesticulated like an actor, stirring the enthusiasm of his audience, who hailed him with cries of “Tusitala, Tusitala!” To Roberto the Knight said how fine he thought it would be to end his days among those people, telling them all the myths of the universe. “But is this Escondida?” Roberto asked. The Knight shook his head.
He died in the wreck, Roberto reflected on the Daphne, and perhaps I have found his Escondida, but I will never be able to narrate it to him, or to anyone else. Perhaps this is why Roberto wrote to his Lady. To survive, you must tell stories.
The Knight’s last fantasy was heard one evening, only a few days and no great distance from what would be the scene of the wreck. They were skirting an archipelago, which the captain had decided not to approach, inasmuch as Dr. Byrd seemed anxious to continue once again towards the Equator. In the course of the voyage it had been evident to Roberto that the captain’s behavior was not that of the navigators he had heard of, who took careful note of all new lands, perfecting their maps, drawing cloud-shapes, tracing the line of shores, gathering native artifacts…. The Amaryllis proceeded as if she were the traveling lair of an alchemist bent only on his Opus Nigrum, indifferent to the great world opening before her.
It was sunset, the play between clouds and sky against the shadow of the island drew on one side what looked like emerald fishes drifting over the peak. On the other there were crumpled balls of fire. Above, gray clouds. Immediately afterwards, as a fiery sun disappeared behind the island, a broad pink stripe was reflected on the clouds, bloodied along the lower fringe. After a few seconds the fire behind the island spread, looming over the ship. The sky was all a brazier with only a few cerulean threads. And then blood everywhere, as if some impenitents had been devoured by a school of sharks.
“Perhaps it would be right to die now,” the Knight of Malta said. “Are you not seized by the desire to hang from the mouth of a cannon and slide into the sea? It would be quick, and at that moment we would know everything….”
“Yes, but at the instant we knew it, we would cease to know,” Roberto said.
And the ship continued its voyage, moving through sepia seas.
The days flowed by, incommutable. As Mazarin had foreseen, Roberto could establish relations only with the gentlemen. The sailors were a gang of jailbirds: it was frightening to encounter one on deck at night. The passengers were starving, ill, praying. Byrd’s three assistants never dared sit at his
