All this consumed much time, particularly because they could not unload directly in the bay: between the ship and the shore, almost at the surface of the water and with only a few, too-narrow gaps, there extended a barbican, a curtain wall, a terreplein, an Erdwall made entirely of coral—in short, what today would be called a coral reef. After many unfruitful attempts they discovered that they would have to round the cape to the south of the bay each time; beyond it there was an inlet that allowed them to land. “And that is why that boat abandoned by the sailors we cannot see nunc, although it is still behind there, heu me miserum!” As can be deduced from Roberto’s transcription, this Teuton had lived in Rome, speaking Latin with his brothers from a hundred countries, but he had had little practice in Italian.
When the Specula had been set up, Father Caspar began making his observations, which proceeded successfully for almost two months. What was the crew doing meanwhile? They were idling, and discipline on board was breaking down. The captain had taken on many kegs of aqua vitae, which were supposed to be used only as a restorative during storms, and then with great parsimony, or else to serve for barter with the natives; but instead, flouting all orders, the crew started bringing the kegs up on deck, and everyone drank to excess, including the captain. Father Caspar was working, the others were living like brutes, and from the Specula he could hear their lewd singing.
One day Father Caspar was working alone at the Specula. It was very hot, so he removed his cassock (thus, the good Jesuit said with shame, sinning against modesty, which God could now forgive since He had punished him promptly!), and an insect stung him on the chest. At first he felt only a little jab, but when he was ferried back on board that evening, he was attacked by a high fever. He told no one of what had happened to him, then in the night his ears rang and his head was heavy, so the captain unbuttoned the cassock, and what did he see? A pustule, such as wasps can cause, or even mosquitoes of great dimensions.
But immediately that swelling became in the officer’s eyes a carbunculus, an anthrax, a nigricant pimple—in short, a bubo, a most evident symptom of the pestis, quae dicitur bubonica, as was immediately noted in the log Panic spread through the ship. It was futile for Father Caspar to tell about the insect: plague victims always lied so as not to be segregated; this was well known. Futile for him to assure them that he knew the plague well, and this was not plague for many reasons. The crew was almost ready to cast him overboard, to avert contagion.
Father Caspar tried to explain that during the great pestilence that struck Milan and Northern Italy a dozen years before, he had been sent, with some of his brothers, to lend a hand in the lazarettoes, and to study the phenomenon closely. And therefore he knew a great deal about that contagious lues. There are diseases that affect only individuals and in different places and times, like the Sudor Anglicus, others peculiar to a sole region, like the Dysenteria Melitensis or the Elephantiasis Aegyptia, and still others that, like the plague, strike over a long period all the inhabitants of many regions. Now, the plague is announced by sun spots, eclipses, comets, the appearance of subterranean animals emerging from their lairs, plants that wither because of mephitis: and none of these signs had appeared on board or on land, or in the sky or on the sea.
Secondly, the plague is certainly produced by fetid air that rises from swamps, from the decomposition of many cadavers during war, also by invasions of locusts that drown in swarms in the sea and are then washed up on shore. Contagion is caused, in fact, by those exhalations, which enter the mouth and the lungs, and through the vena cava reach the heart. But in the course of navigation, apart from the stink of the food and the water, which in any case causes scurvy and not plague, the sailors had suffered no malefic exhalation, indeed they had breathed pure air and the most healthful winds.
The captain argued that traces of such exhalations stick to clothing and to many other objects, and perhaps on board there was something that had retained the contagion at length and then transmitted it. And he remembered the story of the books.
Father Caspar had brought with him some good books on navigation, such as l’Arte de navegar of Medina, the Typhis Batavus of Snellius, and the De rebus oceanicis et orbe novo decades tres of Peter Martyr, and one day he told the captain he had acquired them for a trifle, and in Milan: after the plague, on the walls along the canals, the entire library of a gentleman prematurely deceased had been put out for sale. And this was the Jesuit’s little private collection, which he carried with him even at sea.
For the captain it was obvious that the books, having belonged to a plague victim, were agents of infection. The plague is transmitted, as everyone knows, through venenific unguents, and he had read of people who died by wetting a finger with saliva as they leafed through works whose pages had in fact been smeared with a poison.
Father Caspar employed all his powers of persuasion: no, in Milan he had studied the blood of the diseased with a very new invention, a technasma that was called an occhialino or microscope, and in that blood he had seen some vermiculi floating, and they are precisely the elements of that contagium animatum and are generated by vis naturalis from all rot and then are transmitted, propagatores exigui, through the sudoriferous pores or the mouth, or sometimes even the ear. But this pullulation is a living thing, and needs blood for nourishment, it cannot survive twelve or more years amid the dead fibers of paper.
The captain would not listen to reason, and the small but lovely library of Father Caspar had finally been carried off on the tide. But that was not all: though Father Caspar was quick to say that the plague could be transmitted by dogs and flies but, to his knowledge, surely not by rats, the entire crew nevertheless fell to hunting rats, shooting in every direction, risking breaches in the hold. And finally, as Father Caspar’s fever continued the next day, and his bubo showed no sign of going away, the captain came to a decision: they would all go to the Island and there wait until the priest either died or was healed, and the ship would be purified of every malignant flux and influx.
No sooner said than done. Everyone on the ship boarded the longboat laden with weapons and tools. And since it was foreseen that between the priest’s death and the time when the ship would be purified two or three months might have to pass, they had decided to build huts on land, and everything that could make the Daphne a manufactory was towed to shore.
Not to mention most of the butts of aqua vitae.
“However, they did not do a good thing,” Caspar remarked bitterly, grieved by the punishment that Heaven had wreaked on them for having abandoned him like a lost soul.
For no sooner had they arrived than they promptly went and killed some animals in the woods, then lighted great fires that evening on the beach, and caroused for three days and three nights.
Probably the fires attracted the attention of the savages. Even if the Island itself was uninhabited, in that archipelago there lived men black as Africans, who must have been good navigators. One morning Father Caspar saw about ten pirogues arrive from nowhere, beyond the great island to the west, heading for the bay. They were boats hollowed from logs like those of the Indians of the New World, but double: one contained the crew and the other glided over the water like a sled.
Father Caspar first feared they would make for the Daphne, but they seemed to want to avoid it and instead turned towards the little inlet where the sailors had gone ashore. He tried shouting, to warn the men on the Island, but they were in a drunken stupor. In short, the sailors found the savages suddenly upon them, bursting from the trees.
The sailors sprang to their feet; the savages immediately displayed their bellicose intentions, but none of the crew could think clearly, still less remember where they had left their weapons. Only the captain stepped forward and felled one of the attackers with a pistol shot. On hearing the report and seeing their comrade fall dead though no other human had touched him, the natives made signs of submission, and one of them approached the captain, holding out a necklace taken from around his own neck. The captain bowed, then was obviously seeking some object to give in exchange, and he turned to ask something of his men.
In doing so, he exposed his back to the natives.
Father Wanderdrossel thought that the natives, even before the shot, had been immediately awed by the bearing of the captain, a Batavian giant with a blond beard and blue eyes, features that they probably attributed to the gods. But as soon as they saw his back
