"We will never know whether it was a chance encounter," Tanger said.
She was gazing pensively at the sea. A chance raid by a corsair in search of chance booty, or a black hand reaching from Madrid to guide the
Chergui
to intercept the
Dei Gloria,
sabotage the Jesuits' maneuver and seize the shipment of emeralds? Someone could have been playing a double game in the cabinet of the
Pesquisa Secreta.
But that might be one mystery that could never be solved.
"Maybe they followed them from Gibraltar," said Coy, tracing a horizontal line across the chart with his finger.
"Or maybe they were hiding in some cove," she proposed. "For several centuries that coast was a hunting ground for corsairs. They often hugged the coastline, sheltering on hidden beaches to protect themselves from the winds or replenish water supplies, and especially to lie in wait for prey. You see?" She pointed to a place on me chart between La Punta de los Frailes and La Punta de la Polacra. "This cove here, the one mat is called Los Escullos now, was still called the cove of Mahommed Arraez at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and that's what it's called on the charts and atlases of the day. An
arrdez,
among other things, was the captain of a Moorish corsair ship. And look here, this place is still called Moro island. Moors again. That's why all the towns were built inland, or on a promontory, to guard against raids by pirates."
"Moors on the coast," El Piloto said, referring to the old saying for danger.
"Yes. That's the origin of that phrase. The coast was lined with watchtowers, manned by lookouts charged with alerting the citizenry."
The sun, lower and lower at the stern, was beginning to tinge ' her freckled skin. The breeze whipped the nautical chart in her hands. She was observing the nearby coast with avid concentration, as if its geographic features held ancient secrets.
"That afternoon of February 3," she continued, "no one had to alert Captain Elezcano. He knew the dangers all too well, and he must have been forewarned. That's why the corsair couldn't surprise them, and why the pursuit took so long." Now Tanger traced the shoreline on the chart in an ascending line. "It lasted all night, with a following wind, and the corsair was only able to attack when, in setting more sail, the
Dei Gloria
sprang her foremast."
"Undoubtedly," Coy commented, "because at last he decided to set the topgallants. If he did that despite damage to the rigging, it's because the corsair was upon him. A desperate measure, I'd guess." He consulted El Piloto. "Too much tophamper."
"He would have been trying to reach Cartagena," was El Piloto s opinion.
Coy observed his friend with curiosity. His habitual phlegm seemed to be giving way to an interest Coy had rarely witnessed. He too, Coy thought with amazement, was being infected by the atmosphere. Gradually, as fascination with the mystery intensified, Tanger was enlisting a strange crew, seduced by the ghost of a ship enveloped in murky green shadows. Nailed to the stump of the rotten mast, Captain Ahab's gold doubloon beckoned them all.
"Right," Coy agreed. "But he didn't get anywhere." "So why didn't he give up, instead of fight?" As usual, Tanger had an explanation.
"If the corsairs were Berbers, the captured sailors would have been forced into slavery. And if they were English, the fact that Spain was at relative peace with England would have made things worse for the crew of the
Dei Gloria
_____ That kind of action tended to end with the elimination of witnesses, in order not to leave evidence. And besides, there were the emeralds. So it isn't strange that Captain Elezcano and his men would fight to the end."
With wineskin in hand, El Piloto studied the chart. He took a drink and clicked his tongue.
"They don't make sailors like them anymore," he said.
Coy was of the same mind. Added to the relentless cruelty of the sea, and to the infamous conditions on board, the sailors of that era faced the perils of war such as broadsides and boardings. It was terrible enough to face a storm at sea, but how much worse an enemy ship. He remembered his training on the
Estrella del Sur,
and shuddered just to imagine climbing the swaying rigging of a ship to furl a sail in the midst of grapeshot, cannonballs, severed halyards, and wood splinters flying everywhere.
"What they don't make anymore," Tanger murmured, "is men like them."
As she gazed at the sea and the
Carpanta's
sails billowed in the wind, Tanger's voice throbbed with nostalgia for all she had never known, for the enigma contained in old books and nautical charts, alerting her, like the distant flash from a lighthouse across the waves, that there were still seas to be sailed, shipwrecks to be found, and emeralds and dreams to bring to the light of day. Framed by the hair lashing her face, her eyes appeared to see listing decks, dashing waves, the foaming wake, and the chase that seemed to come to dramatic life before her eyes and to drag the sailor without a ship and the sailor without dreams along with her. And suddenly Coy understood that on that distant evening of February 3, 1767, Tanger Soto would have wanted to be aboard one of those ships. What he wasn't sure of was whether she would have preferred being the hunted or the hunter. But maybe it was all the same.
As El Piloto had predicted, the wind shifted astern when they doubled Cabo de Gata at dusk, with the sun below the horizon and the beam from the lighthouse periodically illuminating the rocky cliffs of the mountain. So they hauled down the mainsail and continued toward the northeast, the loose sheet of the jib hauled now to port. Before it was completely dark, the two sailors prepared the boat for night sailing—lifelines along both sides, self-inflating life jackets with safety harnesses, binoculars, lanterns, and white flares within easy reach. Then El Piloto fixed a quick supper, primarily fruit, turned on the radar, the red light over the chart table, and the running lights for sail, and went below to sleep a while, leaving Coy on watch in the cockpit.
Tanger stayed with him. Rocked by the rolling boat, with her hands in the pockets of Piloto's slicker and the collar turned up, she watched the lights dotting the craggy outline of the coast of Almeria in the distance. After a while she mentioned that she was surprised to see so few lights, and Coy told her that from
Cabo de Gata to Cabo de Palos was the one stretch of the Spanish Mediterranean shore still free of the cement leprosy of tourist development. Too many mountains, the rocky coast, and a scarcity of roads were miraculously keeping that coast nearly virgin. For the moment.
Farther out to sea, a few dots of light beyond the horizon betrayed the presence of merchant ships following courses parallel to the
Carpanta's.
Their headings, more to open water than the sailboat's, kept them at a distance, but Coy tried not to lose sight of them, and took mental sightings of their respective positions at intervals. A constant bearing and closing range, according to the old marine principle, meant certain collision. He bent over the binnacle to verify course and speed. The bow of the
Carpanta
was fixed at 400 on the compass, and she was making four knots. Propelled by a quiet
kbeche,
with the sound of the water against the hull, the boat was gliding easily across the choppy water under a dark dome now filled with stars. The polestar was in place, the immutable sentinel of the north, vertical on the port bow. Tanger followed his upward gaze.
"How many stars do you know?" she asked.
Coy shrugged before answering that he knew thirty or forty. Those indispensible for his line of work That was the master star, the polestar, he said. To its left you could see Ursa Major, which looked like an upside-down comet, and a little above it Cepheus. That group in the form of a W was Cassiopeia. W for whiskey.
'And how can you tell them apart from the others?"
'At any given hour, and according to the season of the year, some are more visible than others_______ If you take the polestar as a beginning point and trace imaginary lines and triangles, you can identify the principal ones."
Tanger looked up, interested, her face barely illuminated in the reddish light from the companion. The stars were reflected in her eyes, and Coy remembered a song from his childhood:
There was a girl I taught to sing....
He smiled in the darkness. Who would have thought, some twenty years later.
"If you form a triangle of the polestar and the two lowest stars in Ursa Major," he said, "there in the third corner... see?... you find Capella. There, above the horizon. At this hour it's still very low, but it will climb in the sky because those stars rotate west around the polestar."
'And that glowing little cluster? It looks like a bunch of grapes."
"Those are the Pleiades. They'll shine brighter once they're higher."
She repeated "the Pleiades" in a low voice, gazing at them for a long time. The light in her pupils, Coy thought, makes her look surprisingly young. Again the snapshot and the dented cup floated through his memory, enfolded in the old song:
I'd like to know
the names of the stars.
"The one that's shining so bright is Andromeda." He pointed. "It's there beside the Great Square of Pegasus, which the ancient
astronomers pictured as a winged horse seen in reverse________ And up there, a little to the right, is the Great Nebula. See it?"
"Yes... I see it."
There was soft excitement in her voice, the discovery of something new. Something impractical, unexpected, and beautiful.
What a night that was, when I gave a thousand names to every star.
Coy sang very quietly. The rolling of the boat and the night growing ever darker, along with Tanger's nearness, put him in a state very close to happiness. You go to sea, he thought, to live moments like this. He had handed the 7x50 binoculars to Tanger, and she was observing the sky—the Pleiades, the Great Nebula, looking for the luminous points he was naming.
"You still can't see Orion, which is my favorite_________ Orion is the Hunter, with his shield, his belt, and the scabbard for his sword. His shoulder stars are called Betelgeuse and Bellatrix, and his left foot is called Rigel."
"Why is he your favorite?"
"He's the most impressive constellation in the sky. More spectacular than the Milky Way. And once he saved my life." "Really? Tell me."
"There isn't much to tell. I must have been about thirteen or fourteen. I had gone out fishing in a little sailboat, and some bad weather blew up. It was very cloudy, and night fell before I got home. I didn't have a compass and couldn't get oriented________________
Suddenly the clouds opened for a moment and I recognized Orion. I set a course and got back to port."
Tanger didn't say anything. Maybe she's thinking about me, Coy hazarded. A little boy lost at sea, looking for a star.
"The Hunter, and Pegasus." She was again searching the sky. "Do you really see all those figures up there?"
"Sure. It's easy when you've been looking for years and years. At any rate, it won't be long before stars shine above the ocean for nothing, because men won't need them anymore to find their way."
"That's bad?"
"I don't know whether it's bad. I do know it's sad."
There was a light in the distance, off the starboard bow, that appeared and disappeared beneath the dark shadow of the sail. Coy gave it a close look. Maybe it was a fishing boat, or a merchant ship sailing close to the coast. Tanger was watching the sky and
Coy thought a moment about lights—white, red, green, blue, or any other color. Someone who didn't know the sea could never suspect what they meant to a sailor. The intensity of their language of danger, warning, and hope. What it meant to look and identify them on difficult nights amid high seas or even during calm approaches to port, the binoculars pressed to your eyes, trying to distinguish the flash from a lighthouse or a buoy from thousands of hateful, stupid, absurd lights on land. There were friendly lights, murderous lights, and even lights tied to remorse, like that time when Coy, the second officer aboard a tanker en route from Singapore to the Persian Gulf, had thought that he saw two red flares in the distance at three in the morning. Even though he wasn't completely sure they were distress signals, he had wakened the captain, who came up to the bridge half-dressed and sleepy-eyed to take a look. But there had been no further flares, and the captain, a dry and efficient man from Guipuzcoa named Etxegarate, had not thought it expedient to alter course. They had already lost too much time passing the Raffles lighthouse and fiendishly busy Malacca Strait, he said. Coy spent the rest of his watch that night with one ear tuned to channel 16 of the ship's radio, to see if he could capture the call of a craft in distress. There was nothing, but he had never been able to forget the two red flares. Perhaps it was the emergency signal some desperate sailor shot off in the darkness, his last hope.
"Tell me," said Tanger, "what that last night aboard the
Dei Gloria
was like."
"I thought you knew everything there was to know."
"There are things I can't know."
The tone of her voice was different from any he'd heard before. To his surprise, it sounded very near, and almost sweet. That made him shift uncomfortably on the teak bench, and at first he didn't know what to say. She was waiting, patient.
"Well," he said at last. "If the wind was the same as what we have new, almost steady astern, the logical thing is that Captain..." "Captain Elezcano," she prompted.
"Yes, that's it. That Captain Elezcano would douse the jibs and stow the staysails, if he was tarrying them. He would surely have left the mainmast without canvas, so that the driver didn't force the rudder or mask the wind from the fore-topsail and foresail; or maybe he just struck the driver and left the main topsail. He might also have set his foretopmast or lower studdingsails, although I doubt he would have done that at night. The one sure thing is that, knowing his ship, he got her ready to make the best possible time without putting on canvas that would spring a mast."