The Island of the Day Before (30 page)

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 (since it is clear that those savage peoples do not believe a divinity has a back), the native leader, club in hand, promptly attacked him and bashed in his head, and the captain fell prone, moving no more. The black men attacked the sailors, who, unable to defend themselves, were massacred.

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 hundred-eightieth 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 one-hundred-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-hundred-sixtieth 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 the order of my Geography in this Globe I have set the Prime Meridian at the westernmost point of the Island of Iron, also to follow the decree of Louis XIII, who with the Council of Geography in 1634 fixed it at that same place."