The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 44
We tried not to speak of it as we carried as much sail as possible running the Portuguese trades down the Iberian coast. We slept badly, since we established extra and military round-the-clock watches. Otter Ransom gave lessons on weaponry; Tall Troll and Skyeless made plans for dealing with boarders. Wild Drumrul lived on the mainmast, eyes set to the east for motorcraft. We were blacked out at night, during the day kept well seaward of the shipping lanes. We remained in this panic until well past Cape Saint Vincent, when we could be reasonably assured we were beyond shore-based boats.
Orri upset our supper one night by speaking aloud our worst fantasy, to Thord, though we all heard: “But pirates? Off Portugal?”
Thord shushed him. Guy said it was not possible, said that it was unwise with people with as little information as we had to suppose that those Pakistanis had been murdered by pirates operating in daylight in the most heavily traveled sea lane in Europe, Ushant to Gibraltar. Grandfather, sitting nearby, reading the Fiddle Bible, listened to Gizur’s translation, then looked accusingly at Guy. Guy returned the stare and said, “It was a freak.”
Later, Lazarus took me, Israel, and Guy aside to explain how he had reworked his earlier thesis; he said that it was well within Europe’s talent to organize a conspiracy of indifference. He grinned in that self-satisfied way of his, brainy, arrogant; he added that if one took into account the violence of the weather, the sea, disease, and those jackals in the boat, such a conspiracy of indifference could mean murder on a massive scale of all those caught helpless, without a nation, a coastline, an island, a rock to cling to.
We sighted Porto Santo, the small island to the northeast of Madeira, at first light on my twenty-second birthday. We were not celebratory. Peregrine told me, “We’ll party when we get to Baja.” Israel overheard this, did not conceal his sigh. We needed water, relief. The sea ran dark and the sky closed about us as we wore away to the west to sight Madeira’s central mountains, shrouded in a dense mist. We intended to clear the stacks on a port tack and come around to the south of Madeira, to anchor at the Funchal Roads by nightfall. I was delighted with myself, not because of my birthday, rather because I was improving quickly as Grandfather’s navigator. I had us exactly on course. It was not to be. A Portuguese cutter boomed out of the lee shore of Madeira to intercept us with unmistakable malevolence. Earle hurried Molly below. Grandfather gave an order and we came about for the southwest. In council that night, Israel and Guy took over an hour to reach the same decision Grandfather already had made about our sailing course. I was bothered that they made such a show of their authority in the command of the ship. But it seemed important to them to be able to tell Grandfather what to do. They ordered Grandfather to continue to the southwest.
Over the next week, we decided to go on two-thirds rations until the Canary Islands. That was our first defeat, and it invited bad turns. We were baffled by light winds, calms, thick pools of gray ooze that seemed to ride the northwesterly swell. We carefully avoided other traffic. We were a day out of Tenerife, the central island of the Canary group and our destination, when we sighted a large mass of dead fish, including several dozen dolphins, belly up, half rotted, riding the crest of a multicolored stain across our front. A fair wind at our quarter spared us the smell, not our doubts. Lazarus, through Gizur, asked Grandfather if this was unusual. Grandfather replied, “Very old.” Israel tried to start an argument with Grandfather, decrying his black fatalism. Grandfather shrugged. It hurt me to see those two dig at each other, especially since, out on the ocean, Grandfather outclassed Israel.
It was the same at Tenerife as it had been at Madeira, with the distinction that one of the two Spanish cutters that came out after us did pass close enough to shout across that we could tie up at the harbor’s breakwater in exchange for gold. They named an astronomical sum and specified it must be gold, not gems or cash money.
On bad rations, save Molly and Peregrine, we made for the last landfall feasible before our Atlantic crossing, the Cape Verde Islands, a week to the southwest. Goggle-Eye was the first of us to sicken. Hallverd, the young King’s Spy (or Evangelical Brigade-man) we had taken with us—and had not been able to land—collapsed with a similar fever soon after, confounding us because we assumed Goggle-Eye’s poor health history made him exceptionally susceptible to infection. We continued to boil the water, which cut further into our supply. We argued the problem might be the fish we caught, or the flying fish that caught themselves. We ran with the wind and in fear of microbes. If it was cholera, we were finished; so we assumed otherwise, and no one else got sick. There was still no margin left. Israel and Guy declared at a council that we should not turn away from any Portuguese cutter without a fight. We readied ourselves for a struggle which did not come, at least not as we anticipated. We sighted Sal, the northeastern island of the Cape Verde archipelago, at midmorning, and swung well clear during the day, passing Boa Vista and Maio cautiously. There was nothing but mist, dark seas, quiet. We slid into Port Praia, on the lee shore of the