South of Sofala

Chapter One: The Cracking of the Mast

For eleven days Gaspar Taveira had not slept above the waterline.

He worked in the belly of the São Valentim by the light of a horn lantern that swung on its hook like a hanged man, and the water came at him through the seams of her sides in thin bright ropes. Every hour the sea found a new place to enter. Every hour he answered it: a wedge of oak driven home with three strokes of the mallet, a length of shoring timber jammed from frame to frame, oakum forced into a weeping seam with the caulking iron until his palms bled through the rags he had wound around them.

He knew this hull the way a man knows the body of a woman he has washed and nursed. He knew the two frames near the mainmast step that had been fished with iron bands in Goa because the shipwrights there had been paid by the day and not by the work. He knew the garboard on the starboard side where the caulking had been done badly in some year before he was born. He knew that the São Valentim was thirty-one years old, which for a caravel of her burden was an age approaching insolence, and that she had been driven for three weeks by a wind that would not let go.

Above him the deck boomed. Feet, and shouting, and the long groan of a ship rolling over onto her shoulder and thinking about it.

"Master Taveira!" The boy came down the ladder in a way that was neither climbing nor falling. He landed in a foot of water, staggered, and caught himself on a shore. "The pumps are choked again. Cristóvão says the well is full of pepper."

"It is not pepper. It is the sweepings of pepper, which is worse." Gaspar did not stop working. "Take the smallest hand you can find and clear the strum box. Not you. Your arms are needed."

João Pires was fourteen years old and built like a bundle of kindling, and there was nobody aboard with smaller hands but he did not say so. He stood in the wet dark and looked at what Gaspar had made of the hold: a forest of props and braces, a cage of new wood inside old wood, holding the sea out by argument alone.

"Will she last, master?"

"She has lasted eleven days more than she wanted to." Gaspar spat out a strand of hemp. "Go."

When the boy had gone he let himself lean against the shore he had just set, and for the space of ten breaths he closed his eyes. He was thirty-four. He had been a carpenter since he was nine years old, when his father, who made ox-carts and church benches in a village behind Lagos, had put a plane into his hands and told him that wood was honest and men were not. He had made his way out of poverty on the strength of joints and mortises, and the sea had paid him better than the land ever had, and it had taken from him the only thing he had owned that was not a tool.

Rui. His brother had been nineteen and had wanted to be a scrivener, and Gaspar had told him that there was no money in ink and a great deal of money in the Indies run. He had spoken for four evenings, patiently, the way he might argue a beam into place. Rui had signed. Rui's ship had gone down off the Cape in the winter of 1584 with all but eleven hands, and Gaspar had spent five years learning that grief does not rot away like wood. It seasons. It grows harder and heavier and takes a better edge.

He opened his eyes and went back to work.

The mast broke a little after the second glass of the night watch.

He felt it before he heard it. Every ship speaks through her timbers, and the mainmast spoke through the step, and what came down through the step into the keelson was not the usual complaint but a single dry crack, like a green branch broken over a knee, and then a shudder that ran the whole length of her.

Gaspar was on the ladder before he had decided to move.

The deck was a place out of a sermon. The rain came level and hard enough to sting, the sea was white to the limit of sight in the failing dark, and above them the mainmast had split some twelve feet above the deck and folded to leeward, dragging its yard and a great sodden ruin of canvas and cordage into the water where it acted as a sea anchor and pulled the ship's head round.

"Cut it away!" That was Lopo Ferraz, the boatswain, bare-headed, planted on the streaming deck with his legs apart as though he had grown there. He had a hatchet in his hand and men around him. "Axes! Cut, you dogs, cut, or she'll roll!"

Gaspar went to the stump. That was his work. He got his shoulder under the broken spar where it lay across the rail and shouted for wedges and for the master gunner's crowbar, and a sailor whose name he never afterwards remembered was crushed between the spar and the rail while he watched, and there was nothing in the world to be done about it.

Somewhere aft, Capitão Álvaro de Meneses was calling for the pilot. Gaspar heard him in snatches. Sound the bottom. Where is Figueira? Where is the navigator?

The navigator was on the poop with his arms wrapped around the mizzen shrouds, and what he said, when they got him forward, was that he did not know where they were. He had not had a sight of the sun in nine days nor a star in eleven, and by his reckoning they were somewhere in the Mozambique Channel between the eighteenth and twenty-second degree of south latitude, and the coast was to the west, and the wind was in the east.

"Then we are being driven onto it," Gaspar said.

"Yes," said Lopo Figueira, and wiped the rain out of his beard, and said nothing else, because he was a precise man and there was nothing else that was precise enough to say.

They heard the reef before they saw it. A sound like a great crowd in a stone church.

Then the São Valentim struck.

Gaspar had imagined it a hundred times in his professional way, the way a physician imagines his own death from the diseases he treats. He had imagined it as a blow. It was not a blow. It was a series of blows, each one worse, and between them the horrible lifting as the sea picked her up and carried her forward to be broken again. The third strike opened her. He felt it in his feet: the long, tearing shriek of a hull losing its shape, treenails drawing, planks springing off frames, thirty-one years of patient joinery undone in the time it takes to say a Credo.

After that there was no ship. There was only water, and things in the water.

He remembered the mainmast stump going by him. He remembered gripping a grating and losing it. He remembered a hand closing on his collar and hauling, and looking up into Ferraz's face, the boatswain roaring something with his mouth wide and no sound coming out of it that Gaspar could hear over the surf. He remembered being rolled along a bottom of coral and sand that took the skin off his back through his shirt, and thinking, with a clarity that shamed him afterwards, that his father's adze was in the tool chest lashed under the forecastle, and that he should go back for it.

He came ashore on his hands and knees in a place where the sea was suddenly only knee-deep and grey light was coming into the sky behind a black wall of trees.

He crawled up the sand until the water let go of his ankles, and then he lay on his face and breathed, and around him in the half-dark other men were doing the same, coughing, weeping, calling names into the noise of the surf. He heard João Pires calling his. He answered. It took him three attempts to make a sound.

When the sun came up they counted themselves.

Ninety-three souls had sailed from Goa in the São Valentim with a lading of pepper and silk and a sealed dispatch in a lead tube for the King in Lisbon. On the narrow beach south of Sofala, in the second week of January in the year 1589, thirty-one of them stood or sat or lay on the sand, and looked at the black bones of their ship lying over on the reef half a league out, and did not know the name of the country at their backs.