Yiddish for Pirates(56)
If there were a mutiny and—Gotenyu—the admiral’s journey came to a sudden and definitive end, we would be quiet. Very quiet. What second log book?
It would be no time to reveal that we were intimates of he who’d gone overboard.
Already, the sailors questioned his books, his charts and his maps.
Several weeks in, the pilots had noticed that the compass needles no longer pointed to the North Star. They muttered that even the heavens were unsure of the journey.
Columbus reassured them. The needles must have been pointing to some invisible point on earth. North was different in the west. The west that would soon become east.
For now, they accepted his explanation, deferring to his self-assurance which was, emes, astronomical.
The compass readings were critical: like all navigators of the time, he used dead reckoning. Appropriate, for as his crew reckoned it, they’d be dead soon enough.
So, when he rode the pitching deck, attempting to determine latitude by pointing his new-fangled astrolabe at the stars, such meshugas inspired even less confidence. These instruments required a steady horizontal, and relations between ship and sea most often resembled a shore-leave sailor writhing between the roiling legs of his shvitzing maideleh.
I’d heard Domingo de Lequeitio muttering with others of the crew.
They were getting restless with too much rest and not enough discovery. If Columbus would not soon agree to turn the ship around, Domingo suggested they could drop him into the Ocean where he would be admiral of an ever-diminishing quantity of air and, eventually, Viceroy of the ocean floor.
“And,” he said, “the tale we sailors will well recollect is that his eyes peeped through his astry-lad only, an’ he stepped into the pitchy brine without knowing. Time enough before he fell, we’d see’d him staggering about the tossing deck with no thought but the stars.”
Moishe and I weren’t troubled by the length of the voyage.
“Know where we’re going?” Moishe asked.
“Of course,” I said, shrugging my grey-wing shoulders.
“Where?”
“West toward—”
“—the west,” Moishe finished. Not content with fishing for the moon, we were chasing the setting sun. Putting distance between us and Spain required time. You couldn’t hurry time. We had no expectations about the unexpected. The world was large, the sea was wide, and there was still salt pork, hardtack, wine and water.
But surely even the sun must need to take a load off and rest a biseleh on a daybed of land before shlepping over the next horizon and rising.
Moishe and I left Columbus’s cabin. Some of the Basque sailors were sitting abaft the forecastle kvetching and making oakum from old rope. Their blaberation concerned the captain.
“The scupper-skulled futtock is willing to die to make hisself gran se?or of lands we’ll not return from.”
The group of them nodded in assent.
“The walty Genoese is sailing us into the barathrum of nowhere ’tils we starve an’ our flesh dries to bouillon.”
They nodded again. They sang the bitter shanty of kvetchers.
Moishe turned to me.
“We all have our across to bear, azoy?”
Before long, Martín Pinzón was rowed across the scalloping water between the Pinta and the Santa María.
“The men can endure no more,” he said to Columbus as he climbed on board. Columbus did not reply but ordered a lombard signal to be fired. Soon after, Martín Pinzón’s brother Vicente Ya?ez Pinzón, captain of the Ni?a, appeared over the starboard bow. He clambered up a ladder and the three captains went into Columbus’s cabin and haken a tsheinik, argued and flosculated late into the night.
The following day, Columbus gathered the crew. “Three more days,” he said. “On the Third Day, He created Dry Land. I need only as much time as God.”
“What’s the difference between the great God Adonai and Columbus?” Moishe asked me.
“What?” I said, knowing the answer.
“God doesn’t think he’s on a mission from Columbus.”
And so we passed the time.
On the second day, the sky was dark. The feathered millions of a great forest were above us, their voices like storm. A twisting hurricane of birds, as if every leaf of a great continent—or the shadow of every leaf—had taken flight and was flying west-southwest. Where there are birds, there must be land. Columbus ordered an alteration of our course to follow this migration, to sail in its shadow.
Two nights later, we could hear more birds calling overhead in the darkness. I did not know these birds or their voices. A vast crowd muttering “watermelon” in a language I had never heard.
Then the crew of the Ni?a found a small branch bearing delicate blossoms and soon after, the men of the Pinta collected from the sea: a cane, a stick, a piece of board, a plant that clearly was born on land, and another little stick fashioned, it appeared, with iron, so intricate was its working. We, on the Santa María, found nothing but a vast collection of waves.
Early morning, October 10. Morning watch. Two bells. Columbus high on the forecastle as if he were about to present us—Aspirin-like—with the two tablets of the law. Instead, he announced that he would award a coat of silk to the first sailor to sight land.
Just what any wind-and-salt bitten sailor wants on the other side of the world: a shmancy silk shmatte to wear when swabbing and breaming and when hauling a shroud in a skin-luffing gale.