We remembered that day of waves without wind and what Columbus had said. Moishe had whispered to me, “Ech, but each day his land becomes more ‘promised.’ ”
“Soon,” I said, “he’ll think himself more Moses than you.”
Not long after this logbook day, we had entered a region of deep blue, thick with seaweed. The waters were of such exceptional clarity that, looking over the gunwales, it seemed as if we could stand on the fishes and eels that swam in myriad constellations far below us. This was the “sea without shores” spoken of by Portuguese marinheiros. The Sargasso Sea. A viscous Atlantis. Some of the crew had heard of this place. Most appeared bazorgt worried and agitated, not knowing what this plenitude of seaweed, this sea change, might mean.
Columbus now left the logbook, then unlocked a chest in the corner of the cabin and lifted out another book. He carried it to the table, and spread, too, its wings beside the other book and pointed to the entry of September 23, the same day’s date.
“Twenty-seven leagues,” Moishe said. The direction is the same but the distance is different.”
“On this voyage,” Columbus said, “as elsewhere, there are two truths. One longer than the other.”
The truth and the shvants-truth, I thought.
“The first book is for the pilot and others of the crew. For now. The second is for history and the future. When we have crossed this great ocean and the men’s feet walk on the shores of Cipangu or the palace paths of the Great Khan, then can the true tale be told. I tell you so that this second truth can be known by one other. Many things may befall an admiral. Sickness. Capture. Mutiny. Death.”
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?”