The Nautical Chart

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  I have to say something, he thought. Something that has nothing to do with what I'm feeling. Something that will let her take over the helm again, or, rather, that will let me see her there again. After all, she's the one giving the orders, and we're still a long way from my watch.

  He tore the card in two and put the pieces on the table. There were no comments. Matter closed.

  "I still don't see it clearly," said Coy. "If there's no treasure, why is Nino Palermo interested in a ship that sank in 1767?"

  "People who search for sunken ships aren't only after treasure." Now Tanger was close, sitting in a chair opposite Coy, leaning forward to narrow the distance between them. 'A ship that sank two and a half centuries ago can be of great interest if it's well preserved.

  The State pays the costs___ They organize traveling exhibitions—

  There's more than gold in the galleons. Consider the collection of Oriental porcelain on board the San Diego, for example. Its value

  is incalculable__ " She paused, lips parted, before continuing.

  "Besides, there's something more. The challenge. You understand? A sunken ship is an enigma that fascinates a lot of people."

  "Yes. Palermo talked about that. The 'green murkiness below,' he called it. And all the rest."

  Tanger nodded, serious, grave, as if she knew the meaning of those words. And yet it was Coy who had been on sunken ships, as well as on ships afloat... and on grounded ships. Not her.

  "Besides," Tanger reminded him, "no one knows what was on the Dei Gloria."

  Coy let a sigh escape.

  "So maybe there is a treasure after all."

  She imitated Coy's sigh, although maybe not with the same motivation. She arched her eyebrows mysteriously, like someone exhibiting the wrapping that hides a surprise.

  "Who knows?"

  She was leaning toward him, close to him, and her expression lighted her freckled face, lending it the complicitous air of a determined little boy, an elemental, sharply physical attractiveness composed of flesh and young, vibrant cells, and golden tones and soft colors that imperiously demanded proximity and touching and brushing of skin against skin. Again blood throbbed in Coy's groin, and this time it wasn't fear. Again that flash of light. Again that certainty. So he let himself drift with the current, without concessions or regrets. At sea all roads are long. After all—and this was his advantage—he had no crew whose ears he had to stop with wax, no one to lash him to the mast to enable him to withstand the voices singing on the reefs, no gods to affect him unduly with their hatred or their favor. He was, he calculated in a quick summing up, fucked, fascinated, and alone. Under those conditions, this woman was as good a course to follow as any.

  THE afternoon was fading, and the yellow light that first illuminated the low clouds and then snaked across Atocha station, covering the intricate reflections in the labyrinth of track with elongated horizontal shadows, now filled the room, outlining Tanger's profile as she bent over the table, casting her dark silhouette beside

  Coy's on the paper of the Naval Hydrographic Institute's nautical chart number 463A.

  "Yesterday," he recapitulated, "we identified a latitude: 37°32'N__ That allows us to draw an approximate line, knowing that

  the moment she went down the Dei Gloria was somewhere on that imaginary line between Punta Calnegre and Cabo Tinoso,

  between one and three miles off the coast____ Maybe more. That can give us soundings of one to three hundred thirty feet."

  "In fact it's less than that," Tanger put in.

  She was following Coy's statements about the chart with close attention. Everything was as professional as if they were in the chartroom of a ship. With pencil and parallel rulers they had drawn a horizontal line that started at the coast, a mile and a half above Punta Calnegre, and ran to Cabo Tinoso below the great sandy arc formed by the Gulf of Mazarron. The depth, which was gentle and sloping on the west side, increased as the line neared the rocky coast farther east.

  "In any case," Coy emphasized, "if the ship is too far down, we won't be able to locate her with our means. Much less dive down to what's left of her."

  "I told you yesterday that I figure it at a maximum of one hundred sixty-five feet—"

  Cold and silence, Coy remembered. And that greenish murk Nino Palermo had referred to. He could feel on his skin the sensation of his first deep dive twenty years before, the silvery light of the surface seen from below, the bluish and then green sphere, the gradual loss of color, the pressure gauge on his wrist, with the needle indicating the increasing internal and external pressure on his lungs, and the sound of his own breathing in his chest and eardrums, inhaling and exhaling air through the regulator. Cold and silence, naturally. And also fear.

  "Even one hundred sixty-five feet is too much," he said. "That dive will take equipment we don't have, or brief dives with long decompression periods, something both uncomfortable and dangerous. Let's say that the reasonably safe limit, in our case, is one hundred thirty. Not a foot more."

  She was still bent over the chart, thoughtful. He watched her chew a thumbnail. Her eyes were following the depths marked along the pencil line drawn by Coy, which ran almost twenty miles. Some of the numbers indicating depths were accompanied by a letter: S, M, R. Sand and mud bottoms, with occasional rock. Too sandy and too muddy, he thought. In two and a half centuries that kind of bottom could cover a lot of things.

  "I think it will be enough," she said. "One hundred thirty.'"

  I'd like to know where she gets that kind of certainty, he thought. The only sure thing about the sea—Coy, like many sailors referring to its physical attributes, sometimes thought of it as feminine, la mar, though he had never thought of giving it a female personality—was that nothing about it was sure. If you managed to do things right, if you stowed the cargo properly, set the correct heading for bad weather, and moderated the engines, and if you didn't steam through raging waves and a wind that was force 9 on the Beaufort scale, the bad-humored old bastard —el mar—might tolerate intruders— But challenge him? Never. When it came to a showdown, he always won.

  "I don't believe it's any more than that." Tanger again.

  She seemed to have forgotten about Zas and her apartment, Coy noted with amazement She was focused on the legends of degrees, minutes, and tenths of a minute that bordered the charts, and once again he admired that apparent willpower. He heard her speaking the appropriate words, with no boasting or unnecessary verbiage. If this is normal, I'll eat my left ball, he said to himself. No woman can be as much in control of herself as she seems to be. She's harassed, she has just been given a sinister warning, and she's high as a kite, scribbling notes on a nautical chart. She's either a schizophrenic or, to put it another way, an extraordinary woman. In either case, it's obvious that she can hold her own, that she's capable, after everything she's been through, of standing here and wielding that pencil and compass as cold-bloodedly as a surgeon wields a scalpel. Maybe she's the one doing the harassing after all, and Nino Palermo, the melancholy dwarf, the Berber chauffeur, and the secretary—and me, for that matter—are just members of her chorus, or her victims. All of us.

  He tried to concentrate on the chart. Having correlated the latitude with the corresponding parallel, they now needed to situate the longitude: the point where that parallel intersected the meridian. The trick was to determine which meridian it was. Conventionally, in the same way the line of the Equator constitutes zero parallel for calculating latitude north or south, the Greenwich meridian is universally considered o°. Nautical longitude is also measured in degrees, minutes, and seconds, or tenths of minutes, counting 1800 degrees to the left of Greenwich for longitude west and 1800 to the right for longitude east. The problem was that Greenwich hadn't always been the universal reference.

  "The longitude seems to be clear," Tanger answered: "4°51'E."

  "I don't see that it's clear. In 1767 the Spanish didn't use Greenwich as the prime meridian__ "

  "Of course the
y didn't. First it was Hierro island, but then every country ended up using their own. Greenwich didn't become the universal reference until 1884. That's why Urrutia's chart, printed in 1751, has scales for four different longitudes: Paris, Tenerife, Cadiz, and Cartagena."

  "Well"—Coy looked at her with respect—"you know a lot about this. Almost as much as I do."

  "I've tried to study it. It's my job. If you look carefully, you can find everything in books."

  Coy silently questioned that. He had read about the sea all his life, and he had never found anything there about a porpoise's scream of anguish as it leaps through the water with one flank ripped away by a killer whale's teeth. Or about the shortest night in his life, as the light of dawn blended into dusk on the reddish horizon of the Oulu roads a few miles from the Arctic circle. Or the song of the Kroomen, black stevedores on the fbrecasde one moonlit night near Pointe-Noire, in the Congo, with holds and deck stacked with trunks of okoume and akaju wood. Or the terrifying clamor of a sudden storm in the Bay of Biscay, when sky and water were indistinguishable beneath a curtain of gray spume, forty-five-foot seas, and an eighty-knot wind, with the waves crumpling the containers lashed on deck as if they were paper before tearing them loose and sweeping them overboard, the watch on duty clinging somewhere on the bridge, terrified, and the rest of the crew in their cabins, tossed across the deck into the bulkheads, vomiting like pigs. It was like jazz, really, the improvisations of Duke Ellington, the tenor sax of John Coltrane, or the percussion of Elvin Jones. You couldn't read that in a book either.

  Tanger had unfolded a map with less detail, much more general than the others, and was referring to imaginary vertical lines on it,

  "It can't be Paris," she said. "That meridian passes through the Balearic Isles, and in that case the ship would have gone

  down halfway between Spain and Italy. Or Tenerife, because that would put it in the middle of the Atlantic. That leaves Cddiz and Cartagena___ "

  "It isn't Cartagena," Coy said.

  He could see that at a glance. If the Dei Gloria had sunk almost five degrees east of that meridian, she would have been too far out to sea, almost two hundred and fifty miles farther, in depths—he leaned a little closer to the chart—of 9,850 feet.

  "Then it has to be Cadiz," she stated. "They found the ship's boy the next day, some six miles south of Cartagena. Calculating the longitude from there, it all comes together. The chase. The distance."

  Coy looked at the chart, trying to estimate the drift of the survivor in his launch. He calculated distance, wind, and currents. Then nodded. Six miles was a logical distance.

  "If that's so," he concluded, "the wind would have shifted to the northwest."

  "It's possible. In his statement, the boy said that the wind

  veered at dawn__ Is that normal in that area?"

  "Yes, the south-westerlies, which we call lebeches here, often blow in the afternoon, and sometimes through the night, which was, according to you, what happened during the chase of the Dei Gloria. In the winter the wind tends to veer to the northwest and blow offshore in the mornings. A west wind or a mistral could push it to the southeast."

  He watched her out of the corner of his eye. Again she was chewing a thumbnail, her eyes fixed on the chart. Coy tossed down his pencil and it rolled across the paper.

  "Besides," he said, "we should throw out anything that doesn't fit your hypothesis__ Right?"

  'It isn't a question of my hypothesis. The normal thing would be for them to calculate the longitude from the Cadiz meridian. Look"

  She unfolded another of the reproductions of the Urrutia chart she had brought from the Museo Naval that morning. With a blunt-tipped index finger, she followed the different meridians as she explained to Coy that Cadiz, first in that city's observatory and then in the observatory of San Fernando, had been the prime meridian Spanish sailors used in the second half of the eighteenth century and a good part of the nineteenth. The San Fernando meridian, however, was not used until 1811, so that a reference in 1767 was still the line from pole to pole that passed through the observatory located in the Guardiamarinas castle in Cadiz.

  "So it was natural for the captain of the Dei Gloria to use Cadiz as a meridian to measure longitude. Look. That way all the figures fit, especially mat 4°5i' the ship's boy gave as the last known position of the Dei Gloria. If we count east from the Cadiz meridian, the point where the ship went down would be here. You see? Right here, east of Punta Calnegre and south of Mazarron."

  Coy studied the chart. It was relatively sheltered and near the coast, not the worst area.

  "That's on the Urrutia chart," he said. "What about the modern ones?"

  "That's where things get complicated, because when Urrutia put together his Atlas Maritimo longitude was established with less precision than latitude. They still hadn't perfected the marine chronometer, which allowed an exact calculation. So errors of longitude tend to be more substantial— Cabo de Palos, where you immediately noticed an error of a couple of minutes latitude, is at longitude o°41.3' to the west of the Greenwich meridian. To situate it with regard to the Cadiz meridian on modern charts you have to subtract the difference in longitude between Cadiz and Greenwich. Isn't that right?"

  Coy agreed, amused and expectant. Not only had Tanger learned her lesson well, she could calculate degrees and minutes with the ease of a sailor. He himself would not have been able to keep all that information in his head. He realized that she needed him for the practical aspects of the project more than anything else, and for confirming her own calculations. Navigating on paper in a fifth-floor apartment across from Atocha station wasn't the same as being at sea on the rolling deck of a ship. He focused on the penciled annotations she had written on a notepad.

  "That gives us," Tanger explained, "a position of 5°50' from Palos with respect to the Cadiz meridian on modern charts. But on

  Urrutia's, the position is 5°34, you see____ So we have a margin of error of two minutes in the latitude and sixteen in longitude. I've used the correction tables given in Nestor Perona's Aplicaciones de Cartografia Histfrica. If you apply them along the coast from Cadiz to Palos, it allows us to situate each of Urrutia's positions with respect to Cadiz at contemporary positions relative to Greenwich."

  The twilight had by now retreated to the walls and ceiling of the room, covering the table with angular shadows, and Tanger interrupted what she was doing to turn on a lamp, illuminating the center of the chart. Then she crossed her arms and stood looking at what she'd drawn.

  "Applying the corrections, the position to the east of the Cadiz meridian that the ship's boy reported for the Dei Gloria would be 1°21' west of Greenwich on modern charts. Of course, this isn't absolutely correct, and the margins of reasonable error would leave a rectangle a mile long and two wide. That is our search area."

  "You don't think that's too small?"

  "As you said the other day, they undoubtedly took their position from land bearings. Using the same chart and a compass, that allows us to refine the location."

  "It isn't that simple. Their ship's compass may have been off, we don't know whether the magnetic declination was significant in those days, and they may have had to rush the reading. Lots of things could throw off the calculations. There's no assurance that yours are going to coincide with theirs."

  "We have to try it, don't we?"

  Coy studied the area on the chart, trying to translate it into seas. He was considering a search zone of three to five square miles, a difficult task if the waters were murky or time had deposited too much mud and sand over the wreck. Sweeping the area could take a month at least. He used the pair of compasses to calculate longitude east with respect to Cadiz on the Urrutia, then turned to the modern chart 463A and transposed that figure to longitude west from Greenwich, then transferred the estimate back to the Urrutia. He consulted the correction tables Tanger had drawn up. Everything was within acceptable margins. "Maybe it can be done," he said.

  Tanger hadn
't missed a single detail of his movements. She took up a pencil to draw a rectangle on chart 463A.

  "The idea is that the Dei Gloria is somewhere in this strip. At a depth that varies from sixty-five to one hundred sixty-five feet."

  "What's the bottom like? I suppose you've checked that."

  She smiled before unfolding a large-scale chart, number 4631, corresponding to the Gulf of Mazarr6n from Punta Calnegre to Punta Negra. Coy observed that it was a recent edition, with corrections of warnings to sailors dated that same year. The scale was very large and detailed, and every sounding was accompanied by the corresponding nature of the sea floor. It was the most precise reading available for the zone.

  "Sandy mud and some rock. According to the references, relatively clear."

  Coy set the compasses on the scale at the side, calculating the area again. One mile by two, off Punta Negra and the Cueva de los Lobos. Considering that a minute of longitude was equal to 0.8 miles in that location, the sector was defined between 1°19.5' and 1°22,W, and between 37°31.5' and 37°32.5,N. He observed with pleasure the familiar ocher-colored coast, the water growing bluer over the sandbanks as they descended from the coast. He compared those drawings with his own recollections, mentally situating references of inland mountains on the circles of topographical levels that clustered closer together on the peaks of Las Viboras and Los Pajaros, and on Morro Blanco.

  "This is all very relative," he said after a moment. "We can't be sure of anything until we're on the water, setting our position with the charts and the bearings we take on land. It's pointless to define the area of search from here. All we have now is an imaginary rectangle drawn on paper."