“What’s your name?” the stranger asked.
“Carlos.”
“I am Alonso de la Serena, and this is my ship,” the stranger said, pounding the railing with his knuckles like a shopkeeper boasting about a new counter.
“Where are you bound?” Carlos asked diffidently.
“To Jamaica, where there are fortunes waiting to be made. Gold so plentiful that it washes down rivers like gravel. Labor so cheap that it costs a man nothing to put in a crop. Feed the natives, and they work like mules. A climate so beneficent that men live to be seventy and eighty years old without infirmity of mind or body because the air is so sweet and the nights so mild. It is a paradise that awaits us only a month’s sail away.”
Carlos glanced at the ship, noting the neatness of the ropes and the cleanliness of the deck. He swept his eye over the main mast and noticed the tight furl of the sails. She was a three-masted lateener that bore the influence of Portuguese shipwrights, but she had been rerigged to fly a square sail, her lateen yards removed. Alonso anticipated his query.
“The wind will be behind us for most of the voyage. On the return, if we foolishly decide to leave paradise, we will ride the westerlies back to Spain. A lateen sail is difficult for running. It is the same change that Christopher Columbus made to his vessel.”
Carlos knew well the deficiencies of the lateen sail. He remembered the nightmare of steering a lateen-rigged frigate bound from Tangier for the west coast of Africa. The ship yawed badly, and with every little shift of the wind, the lateen had to be readjusted, which meant lowering the sail and hoisting it again on the other side of the main mast. Five men had to do this in the darkness with a lumpy following sea pounding them astern and the light from the three-quarter moon barely enough to illuminate the rigging. That was one of the worst nights he’d ever spent on a ship since he took to sea as a grommet of eleven—and it was all because of an unsuitable lateen sail. The Mallorcan was truly a seaman.
The discussion veered to the particulars. It was the particulars that drove sailors mad on a long voyage, the little pinpricks that the master would enforce at sea. Sometimes a man who was harsh in port turned into a mild and friendly master once the ship was underway. But more often than not, it was the opposite that was true—the man who was gentle when his feet were on land became a demon at sea. One had no way to predict this change, but Carlos had a theory. He had found that capricious and harsh masters showed their true underside in port when questioned on one issue: the sleeping arrangements permitted aboard ship.
“Where do you allow your men to sleep, señor,” he asked mildly, fixing the older man with a careful stare.
“Anywhere they like,” came the crisp reply, “so long as their presence does not interfere with the smooth running of the ship.”
“On deck, at nights?”
“Certainly, on deck. But I warn every man to lash himself down with rope so he won’t be washed overboard.”
“You do not insist that the men sleep below?”
“It is an oven sometimes below deck,” de la Serena said candidly. “No man should be asked to sleep in an oven.”
Carlos tried to read the craggy face before him, to fathom its temperament, its truthfulness. De la Serena returned his stare openly, and for a brief moment the two of them looked at each other deeply like lovers. Then Carlos, feeling uncomfortable, turned away with a casual shrug.
He did not understand how anyone could be born on Mallorca—one of the Baeleric Islands, consisting of eleven islets and four larger islands, none of which Carlos particularly liked, probably because he had visited them only during stormy seas when his ship was in danger of floundering. He thought the island barren and inhospitable, suitable with its ironbound shoreline as a rookery for sea birds.
De la Serena asked a series of nautical questions, to test Carlos’s seamanship, and the Spaniard answered with an offhanded nonchalance that bespoke his experience. The older man knew a sailor when he saw one. Carlos knew the names of all the kinds of vessels tied up around them. He had strong opinions on the handling differences between a lateen sail and square rigging. Like most seamen of the day, he was filled with suspicions and had stories to tell about how some talisman had saved his life. But more importantly, to de la Serena at least, was that he bargained hard for the little comforts that true seamen loved to have around them—liberal run of the ship, for example—asking questions about the cook and the types of meals that would be served.
It remained only for Carlos to pass one more test, and de la Serena, who had already decided to sign him on, asked him to shimmy up the main mast and climb into the crow’s nest. The Santa Inez, like all vessels of her day, was without ratlines, which had not yet been invented, and reaching her crow’s nest required a seaman’s agility and strength.
Carlos walked over to the main mast, gripped a halyard, leaped onto the mast, and propelled himself up, using his hands and feet to clasp the wood. In a blink, he was in the crow’s nest and pretending to be scanning the horizon.
“Come down and sign the papers,” de la Serena invited.
Carlos slid down the mast. “I have nowhere to sleep tonight,” he began, but de la Serena cut him short.
“Sleep aboard ship,” he said, heading below for the papers.
A few minutes later, the mostly ritualistic signing was complete, and Carlos got the opportunity to show off his cursive signature with all its elaborate curlicues. His contract said that until the Santa Inez returned to Cádiz, Carlos was bound to service aboard her at one thousand maravedis per month. It was not much, but it was a little more than Carlos had earned on his last ship.
De la Serena opened a bottle of wine and they drank a goblet each and shared some bread. Other than the two of them and a cabin boy named Pedro who mostly stayed out of sight, the ship was deserted, the crew having gone carousing for what might be the last night ashore for many weeks. With a little wine under his belt, de la Serena became very talkative, and the two men sat on deck and chatted about the Indies while a grainy darkness settled over Cádiz.
Carlos was content. He listened sleepily to the other man’s rambling, casting an occasional eye at the whores prowling the shadows and weighing his chances of sweet-talking one of them into giving him a free sample.
Such a thing had never happened to him, but a long time ago, he had shipped out with a man from Albacete who swore that it had happened to his cousin in Perpignan, France, during a layover of five days while a bitter storm raged over the Mediterranean. It was a miraculous interlude that his cousin had enjoyed with the whore, all done freely and with affection. In fact, when the bad weather lifted and the time to sail again had come, the whore handed him a sackful of money and begged him to jump ship and live with her. Such a thing had never happened to Carlos, yet he was hopeful.
Some few hours later, he curled up in a corner of the deck and went to sleep. De la Serena retreated to his quarters below. Like many ships of her time, the Santa Inez had only a single private compartment, which belonged to the master. Everyone else aboard shared the common areas of the ship as living space.
Carlos fell into a deep sleep as a crescent moon leaked a soft saffron light over the minarets of Cádiz erected in the eighth century by Moor invaders. Over the centuries, all of Spain had been a bloody battleground between Christianity and Islam, and everywhere on this ancient land vestiges marking the dominance of one creed over the other lingered. The bulbed towers soared over the smaller buildings of the sleeping city like stalks of giant tulips, and it required only a little imagination to hear the bleat of a muezzin calling the Islamic faithful to prayer. But that custom was no longer observed, Alfonso the Wise, king of Leon and Castile, having driven the Moors out of Cádiz in the early thirteenth century, restoring Christianity.
None of this was known to Carlos, who, though he was not an innocent, always slept soundly, for a seaman learned to sleep anywhere and anytime when he was tired. And today, a long and trying day by his own calc
ulation, had been exhausting. So although the deck was hard and the wood cold against his bones, he was asleep almost as quickly as his head touched the floor.
End of Excerpt
Also by Anthony C. Winkler
and available from Akashic Books,
at bookstores, and from e-book vendors everywhere.
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The Lunatic
"The author never relaxes his hilarious examination of the island's taboos . . . By far the funniest book I've read in a decade, although its ribald atmosphere is sprayed with the pepper-gas of aggressive social satire." —Washington Post Book World
Dog War
"When was the last time you laughed out loud at a book, and I mean the hold-your-sides, near-hysterical-with-joy kind of laughter? Dog War is a pitch-perfect and truly uplifting read, wonderfully written with a flourish and an art that is like the best conversation. Winkler is the Prozac of literature, the true feel-good factor we seek in Oprah and the likes. You want to help somebody? . . . Give them Dog War, they'll be forever in your debt." —Ken Bruen, author of The Guards
Duppy
"Every country (if she's lucky) gets the Mark Twain she deserves, and Winkler is ours, bristling with savage Jamaican wit, heart-stopping compassion, and jaw-dropping humor all at once." —Marlon James, author of John Crow's Devil.
ANTHONY C. WINKLER was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1942 and is widely recognized as one of the island's finest exports. After being expelled from Cornwall College for refusing to submit to corporal punishment (which entailed being beaten with a cane), he eventually made his way to California where he attended Citrus College and California State University, earning a BA and MA in English. His first published novel, The Painted Canoe (1984), received critical acclaim and was followed by The Lunatic (1987), The Great Yacht Race (1992), The Duppy (1997), Crocodile (2009), and Dog War (2007). Trust the Darkness: My Life as a Writer, his autobiography, was published in 2008. His writing credits also include film scripts and plays. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with his wife Cathy.
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