A horrible banquet ensued, and continued three days. Father Caspar, in his illness, followed all of it through his spyglass, impotent. The crew became so much butcher’s meat: Caspar saw the men first stripped (with shrieks of joy, the savages divided clothes and objects), then dismembered, then cooked, and finally chewed with great calm, between gulps of a steaming beverage and some songs that to anyone would have seemed innocent, if they had not accompanied that ghastly kermess.
Then the natives, sated, began pointing at the ship. Probably they did not associate it with the presence of the sailors: majestic as it was with masts and sails, incomparably different from their canoes, they had not thought it the work of man. According to Father Caspar (who felt he understood the mentality of idolators throughout the world, for the Jesuit travelers, returning to Rome, would give accounts of them), they believed it an animal, and the fact that it had remained neutral while they indulged in their anthropophagic rites strengthened this conviction. For that matter even Magellan—Father Caspar insisted—had told how certain aborigines believed that ships, having come flying from the sky, were the natural mothers of the longboats, which they nursed allowing them to hang from their sides, then weaned them by flinging them into the air.
But now someone probably suggested that if this animal was meek and its flesh as tasty as the sailors’, it was worth seizing. And they headed for the Daphne. At which point the peaceful Jesuit, to keep them at a distance (his Order imposed that he live ad majorem Dei gloriam and not die for the satisfaction of some pagan cujus Deus venter est), lit the fuse of a cannon already loaded, and turned it towards the Island, and fired a ball. With a great roar, while the Daphne’s flank was haloed with smoke as if the animal were snorting with wrath, the ball fell amid the pirogues, overturning two of them.
The portent was eloquent. The savages went back to the Island, vanishing into the woods, and they emerged a little later with wreaths of flowers and leaves which they cast on the water, making gestures of reverence before they vanished beyond the western island. They had paid what they considered a sufficient tribute to the great irritated animal, and surely they would never be seen again on these shores: they had decided that the area belonged to a peevish and vindictive creature.
This was the story of Father Caspar Wanderdrossel. For at least a week, before Roberto’s arrival, he had felt ill again, but thanks to some preparations of his own making (“Spiritus, Olea, Flores, und andere dergleichen Vegetabilische, Animalische, und Mineralische Medicamenten”), he had already begun to enjoy his convalescence, when one night he heard footsteps on the deck.
From that moment, out of fear, he fell ill again, abandoned his room and took refuge in that cubbyhole, taking with him his medicines and a pistol, not knowing whether or not it was loaded. And from there he emerged only to seek food and water. At first he stole the eggs for nourishment, then he confined himself to consuming the fruit. He became convinced that the Intruder (in Father Caspar’s account the Intruder was naturally Roberto) was a man of learning, curious about the ship and its contents, and he began to wonder if this man might not be, rather than just a castaway, the agent of some heretical country that wanted the secrets of the Specula Melitensis. This is why the good father had taken to behaving in such a childish fashion, intending to drive Roberto to abandon that vessel infested with demons.
Then it was Roberto’s turn to tell his story, and not knowing how far Caspar had read in his writings, he dwelt in detail on his mission and his voyage on the Amaryllis. The narration took place while, at the end of that first day, they boiled a cock and opened the last of the captain’s bottles. Father Caspar had to recover his strength and make new blood, and they celebrated what now seemed to each a return to the human community.
“Ridiculoso!” Father Caspar commented after hearing the incredible story of Dr. Byrd. “Such bestialitas have I never heard. Why did they do to him that harm? Of the longitude mysterium I thought to have heard all, but never that it could be sought by using the unguentum armarium! If that was possible, a Jesuit would have invented. This has no connection with longitudes, I will explain you how good I do my work, and you will see it is different….”
“Now tell me,” Roberto asked, “were you hunting for the Islands of
Solomon or did you want to solve the mystery of longitudes?”
“Why, both, is it not? You find the Islands of Solomon and you have learned where is the hundred-eightieth meridian, you find the hundredeightieth meridian and you know where are the Islands of Solomon!” “But why must those islands lie on that meridian?”
“Ach mein Gott, the Lord forgive I take His Most Holy Name in vain. In primis, after Solomon the Temple had constructed, he made a great fleet, as the Book of Kings says, and this fleet arrives at the Island of Ophir, from where they bring him—how do you say?—quadrigenti und viginti…”
“Four hundred twenty.”
“Four hundred twenty talents of gold, a very big richness: the Bible says very little to say very much, as if pars pro toto. And no land near Israel had such big riches, quod significat that the fleet to ultimate edge of the world had gone. Here.”
“But why here?”
“Because here is the meridian one hundred eighty which is exactlich the one that divides the earth in two, and on the other side is the first meridian: you count one, two, three, for three hundred sixty degrees of meridian, and if you are at one hundred eighty, here it is midnight and in that first meridian, noon. Verstanden? You guess now why the Islands of Solomon are so named? Solomon dixit: Cut baby in two. Solomon dixit: Cut Earth in two.”
“I understand, if we are on the one-hundred-eightieth meridian, we are at the Solomon Islands. But how do you know we are actually on the onehundred-eightieth meridian?”
“Why, the Specula Melitensis, nichtwahr? If all my previous evidence is not enough to prove the one-hundred-eightieth meridian passes just there, the Specula also proved it.” He dragged Roberto onto the deck, pointing to the bay. “You see that promontorium north there, where big trees stand with big paws walking on the water? Et hora you see the other promontorium south? You draw a line between the two promontoria, you see the line passes between here and the shore, a bit more apud the shore than apud the ship…. See the line, I mean a geistige line that you see with eyes of imagination? Gut, that line is the line of the meridian!”
The next day Father Caspar, who never lost track of time, informed Roberto it was Sunday. He celebrated Mass in his lodging, consecrating a crumb of one of the few hosts he had left. Then he resumed his lesson, first there, among globes and maps, then on deck. When Roberto remonstrated, unable to tolerate the full light of day, the priest from one of his cupboards produced a pair of spectacles, but with smoked lenses, which he had once used to explore profitably the mouth of a volcano. Roberto began to see the world in softer colors, finally very pleasant, and he began gradually to be reconciled to the severity of daylight.
To clarify what follows I must provide a gloss, for if I do not, I will not know where I am either. Father Caspar was convinced that the Daphne lay between the sixteenth and seventeenth degrees of latitude south and at one hundred eighty longitude. As far as latitude is concerned, we can trust him completely. But let us imagine he had also got the longitude right. From Roberto’s confused notes it seems Father Caspar calculates precisely three hundred sixty degrees from the Isla de Hierro, eighteen degrees west of Greenwich, as tradition had required since the days of Ptolemy. Therefore if he considered that he was at the one-hundred-eightieth meridian, it meant that in reality he was at the one-hundred-sixty-second east (from Greenwich). Now the Solomons lie comfortably around the one-hundredsixtieth east, but from five to twelve degrees latitude south. Therefore the Daphne would have been too low, west of the New Hebrides, in a zone where only some coral reefs appear, those that would later become the Recifs d’Entrecasteaux.
Could Father Caspar have calculated from another meridian? Certainly. As Coronelli, at the end of that century, was to say in his Libro dei Globi, the first meridian was established by “Eratosthenes at the Pillars of Hercules, by Martin of Tyr at the Isles of the Blest, and Ptolemy in his Geography accepted the same opinion, but in his Books of Astronomy he transferred it to Alexandria in Egypt. Among the moderns, Ishmael Abulfeda marks it at Cadiz, Alfonso at Toledo, Pigafetta and Herrera the same, Copernicus sets it at Fruemburg, Reinhold at Monte Reale or Koenigsberg, Longomontanus at Copenhagen, Lansbergis at Goes, Riccioli at Bologna, and the atlases of Iansonius and Bleau at Monte Pico. To continue
