The Plurality of Worlds. Brian Stableford
have been to warn the boy against taking the Lord’s name in vain, but they were in the middle of the misnamed Pacific Ocean now. Although Drake had prayed as fervently as he ever had in his life during the storms that had driven them back to Peru when they had first emerged from the Magellan Straits, cursing did not seem so dire a sin when the nearest church was a thousand miles away and papist.
“What is it, boy?” Drake asked, anxiously.
“It’s a ship, captain,” Martin reported. “She’s heading straight toward us with full sail. She’s bigger than the Pelican.”
Drake did not trouble to remind his kinsman that the Pelican had now been the Golden Hind for more than fifty days. “Is she flying Spanish colors?” he asked, filled with sudden dread.
“The cross of Saint George!” Martin reported, excitedly. “She’s English!”
Drake could not share his cousin’s enthusiasm. The remainder of his crewmen would doubtless be as glad as Martin to discover Englishmen on the far side of the world, but to him it signified that he had been forestalled. He could not imagine by whom, but the fact was obvious—unless the red cross were a treacherous ploy, intended to deceive. That seemed unlikely, though. The Spanish ships plying the nascent navigation-paths west of the Americas were cargo-vessels, not warships; they had no fear yet of pirates or privateers and no incentive to display false colors.
Although the Hind was anchored to the south of the islet, with no headland to shield her from view, there was no way that the captain of this mysterious vessel could tell what she was unless the man in his crow’s-nest was equipped with a telescope at least as good as his own. Even if the Spanish navy had such instruments, they would not have been given to explorers of this ocean. As good Romanists, the Spaniards were supposed to believe that the Pacific had no land in it at all, with the possible exception of Dante’s mount of Purgatory. The existence of the Americas had already proved Cosmas’ geography ludicrously false, but the Roman Church always let go of its mistakes by slow degrees.
“Has she gun-ports in her sides?” Drake demanded.
“Can’t tell,” Martin replied. “She’s front-on, and all I can see for sure is her sails. But she’s English, captain—English for sure.”
“Come down now!” Drake commanded. The boy made haste to obey. Drake remembered as soon as he had spoken that he had not asked for details of the more distant island that Martin had seen—but there would be time enough for that when more urgent matters had been settled.
Drake did not wait for Martin’s feet to touch the ground. He set off down the hill, cursing himself for not having cleared a better trail as they came up it. Running was direly difficult, and it seemed to Drake that the vines had become positively malevolent, lying in ambush to catch his feet and trip him. To avoid any impression of panic, though, he waited until he did not have to yell at the top of his voice to order William Ashley, his second mate, to regather the landing-party and get the pinnace afloat.
The wind was blowing from the west, almost directly contrary to the course Drake had been endeavoring to follow. That was why he had consented to put in at such a unpromising island, which would surely have been inhabited had it nursed the free-standing pools and streams of fresh water he needed to replenish his casks. Given that the other ship was under full sail, and had been close enough for its colors to be identifiable at first sight, it would likely reach the island within the hour. It would be politic for the Golden Hind to be in deep water when she arrived, with sail enough aloft to out-maneuver her. Even if her colors were true, that could not guarantee that her crew-members were loyal subjects of Queen Jane. It was darkly rumored in Plymouth that the Elizabethans had enough ships and captains of their own to form a shadow navy of sorts, and that they had secret bases in the far-flung corners of the globe, from which they ceaselessly plotted rebellion. Drake thought such tales highly unlikely, but the appearance of the ship was so improbable in itself that he dared not discount any possibility.
Drake had no fear of being outgunned, let alone of being outsailed, by Spaniards, Elizabethans or the Devil himself. The tightness in his chest and the nauseous feeling in his gut arose entirely from frustration, not from some God-given presentiment of disaster. As he made what haste he could to reach the strand with his dignity intact, all he could think about was the folly that had caused him to be seduced by Tom Digges and John Dee into volunteering for the crew of the ethership instead of making his present expedition three years before, in 1577. That three-year delay, it seemed, had cost him his priority. Even knowing the position of the island he had selected as his target—the sole advantage he had obtained from the ethership’s disastrous voyage—had proved inadequate. Someone had got here ahead of him.
There was confusion on the beach as men hurried back toward the pinnace from every direction, bearing whatever natural booty they had been able to gather—coconuts, for the most part, with a few turtles and baskets of eggs laid by ground-nesting birds. There was need of a sharp mind and a commanding voice, but Drake was careful to give his orders in a level voice rather than barking or howling them, forming the words with precision. No one asked him what the matter was; the crew did as they were told, as quickly and efficiently as they could. Once Martin had arrived in his wake, though, still carrying the precious telescope, the sailors were quick to seek better enlightenment from the boy.
The mate was the one man who guessed why Drake was so anxious in the face of seemingly-good news. As soon as the pinnace was afloat and headed back to the Golden Hind Ashley made his way to Drake’s side and murmured in his ear: “How did they come here, captain? Who else knows what you know about the isle at seventeen?” He meant seventeen degrees south—the latitude that Walter Raleigh had estimated while he had hastily sketched a series of maps during the ethership’s initial ascent.
“Why, no one,” the captain replied, grimly. “Who would believe it, if anyone did, since I am mad, and everything that happened aboard the ethership was mere Devil-led delusion?”
Drake spoke sarcastically, as he had learned to do, but it was the truth. So far as he knew, no one else did know of the island’s existence, save for the Golden Hind’s officers—and none of them had been told until they had left the Magellan Straits. He had told no one in England—not even Tom Digges, while he tried in vain to convince the ethership’s master that their experiences within the moon and among the stars had most certainly not been a dream.
Only three of the Queen Jane’s five-man crew had survived the break-up of the ship, although the bodies of the other two had never been found, presumably having fallen into the Kentish marshes or the Thames estuary. Of those three, John Field had embellished his own experiences with such a surfeit of imagined devilry that no one in the world—with the possible exception of his master, Archbishop John Foxe—could have believed his testimony. Tom Digges, to Drake’s utter astonishment, had claimed that it had all been a hallucination caused by the intoxicating effects of the ether. The combination of those two testimonies, set against his own, had made Drake seem a monumental fool when he insisted that it had all been real, and that the Devil had not come into it at all. Drake had been forced to abandon that insistence, and by virtue of that abandonment, he had kept Walter Raleigh’s sketch-map a very close secret indeed. He had taken care not to show it to Master Dee, let alone to Northumberland or any other member of the Privy Council, reserving it for his own future use.
In truth, he could not know how trustworthy the map was. Had he not had his own duties to attend to while the ethership was in flight—he was the only true crewman aboard, save for Digges—he would certainly have made his own maps as best he could, or at least graven the sight of the world’s far side more securely into his memory, but he had had work to do. Raleigh had been trained in navigation and mathematics by Dee, just as Drake had, so his eye ought to have been trustworthy, but Raleigh had stuffed most of his drawings and scribblings into his own doublet before leaping to his death. Drake had only picked up a single sheet, dropped in the confusion, and he had no reliable way of knowing how good its scrawled estimates of latitude and longitude were, or whether the island really was the largest landmass in the vast Pacific east of the Austral continent and its companion isles.
If even he could not be sure of anything, what reliable