"What'd you say—?"
He was standing with shimmering waves of heat from the sizzling deck coming up around him, squinting up at the burning sun with his head cocked. His watch was opened in his hand.
"The way I figured it, we should be crossing the Equator right about now."
We were listlessly, miserably chipping that prow deck— I'd given up trying to get comfortable. I've seen some hopeless old plugs standing in the city streets, standing foursquare with their bloated old bodies suspended from each of their rickety legs. If anyone had shoved one of those woodeny old supports out of line, they'd have fallen over with a dusty crunch. I felt like that. Day had run into night and night into day. There was glaring light or a lack of it, but the heat had tied those past seventy-two hours into one continuous misery.
All the others looked up at the Bos'n. Nobody asked how he knew. We all had heard from Philip who serviced his cabin, too, that the little man spent those long evenings in his room, charting the course of our ship by guess—by information he extracted from the men on watch and by shooting the sun crudely with his fingers—a trick I'd heard of, that improvised sextant stunt, but never seen done until I saw him do it one noon.
He had no more right up in the chart room than any of the day men, and he never talked with the Second Mate who was the ship's navigating officer, but he asked the A.B.'s after they'd put in their turn at the wheel how many knots we'd made and what course we set and he made notes on a little pad. Everybody knew and everybody co-operated except that bullet-headed guy on the Third Mate's watch. That lug always forgot, he said.
We don't know why the little guy did it. Maybe just to kill time. Others thought he must have been a Mate aboard some ship, and had lost his berth, but no one knew for sure. He didn't talk about himself.
The men all kneeling bluntly like a herd of beasts on a sun-hardened, rusty, plain slowly turned their heads and squinted up at him as he looked back toward the bridge and our eyes followed his back. We all looked over our shoulders, all except the Fat Man. He'd given up trying to kneel as he chipped a long time ago. He rolled over and looked, uncovering a dark, damp spot on the deck. He'd sweated a pool around himself as he sat there frying in his own grease.
The Swede Mate was up on the bridge with the Third Mate, though it wasn't his watch. The Old Man must have been having his usual afternoon snooze in his cabin. Crossing the Equator was no novelty to him.
The forward deck was empty. For some reason it made me think of the flat stretch of a hot baseball field; I couldn't understand that—it hadn't the shape or color—maybe it was just the tension.
Mush and I anxiously watched those two doors that led into the purple darkness of the shelter deck. If the Maverick and his bloody Father Neptune brigade came at us, it would be from those doors. Sweat poured down on my glasses and I let it run—I hadn't any clean handkerchiefs. Finally, when the effort of twisting around and watching those ominous holes in the bulkhead got too much for me, I went back to chipping with a bitter indifference.
The hell with them. If they came, they came. Being hauled through that water couldn't be any worse than chipping rust blisters on that burning deck—it would be cool at least—and I decided if that bunch did show up with their keelhauling lynch ropes, homemade splintered wood razors, rusty wire shaving brushes, and buckets of flesh-eating lather (made the week before, the Maverick had told us, from a bucket of Soogie fermented in a mixture of fishoil and crude oil—equal parts), I'd ask the Bos'n to please keep my glasses for me. He was the only one on the prow deck who wore a shirt, and he could tuck them away in his breast pocket. Then I'd be ready for my shave by King Neptune's daughter—or was he to do the shaving and we marry the daughter, before or after we were keelhauled? I didn't know the procedure, and I never found out.
The Neptune brigade didn't show up.
In the hot mess at supper the Maverick and a few others bellyached: What did them lousers up on midships think—the crew was going to carry on the ceremonies on their own time? Nuts! If midships didn't have the decency to co-operate, and cut down the engines and give the crew time off when we hit the Equator—t'hell with them. There'd be no ceremonies. And there wasn't.
11. The Truth About Columbus
SOMEHOW I FELT NOW THAT WE WERE SAFELY OVER the bump of the Equator we'd go slithering down the underside of the globe lickety-split and tie up at our destined port in no time at all. Unfortunately I'd never paid much attention to geography after my third year in grammar school, where we learned that the world was round. What did it—and spelling, too, for that matter, which I never could manage—have to do with drawing pictures (rear view) of our moon-faced teacher, Miss Conway, who wore a gigantic black taffeta bow around the knees of her hobble skirt as she explained all this stuff from charts she scribbled on the blackboard? I learned how to draw to the detriment of my geography lessons.
Naturally I'd heard about this gravity thing, which clamps the lower Atlantic to the globe as securely as it fastens on our northern waters, but I figured vaguely it still was on the down-grade and there might be a little drip to it, so we'd slide a little faster down under.
Sitting on the hatch, occasionally I wondered how Columbus got away with it—how could he have persuaded the Queen of Spain to sink all her jewels in the gamble that the world is round with the material he had. Since it's well known—history is oft recorded in old folk songs—I gave particular attention to a version Joe sang of the Christopher Colombo chanty. It differed from the accepted conventional—in fourteen hundred ninety-two was the time Columbus started. The Queen of Spain shed a bucket of tears but Columbus—etc., etc. That suggested of course that it was an affaire de coeur and he had used her love for him to swindle her out of jewels, thus financing his wild schemes. Joe's version indicates Columbus used cold logic. As I remember it—in fourteen hundred ninety-two a Dago from Italio was walking up and down the street selling hot tamalio. One day he walked up to the Queen, demanded ship and cargo; and I'm a lousy sonabitch if I don't bring back Chicago—for I know the world is roundo and sailors can be browndo—etc., etc., and it went on to such depths of degradation I would not attempt to write it, although the essence of it suggested a scientific disclosure.
Assuming then that Columbus persuaded the Queen by sterling-pure logic—and granting the success of the standing-egg-on-end demonstration—and that it had taken place (though I wondered when I first heard of it as I do now—was it a hard, soft, medium or raw bit of hen fruit)—but if you will recall, his strongest argument was that on sighting a ship out at sea the observer first sees the tip of her mast, then sails, finally hull coming up from the horizon, thus proving the surface of the seas are bent, and that happens everywhere, he contended. Therefore, if the surfaces bend all around Eureka, the earth is shaped like a ball. Q.E.D.
I rise from my hatch in protest, for sitting as I did—whenever I could—and studying the horizon and its relation to ships, Fd never seen a time when it appeared as if our ship was tettering on a hump of water. It seemed to me we rested at the bottom of an immense, blue-green bowl—the horizon rose all around us as its rim. It was a handsome bowl and sometimes, when schools of grinning porpoises flashed up in the sun rolling over each other in that breathless game of tag they were always playing, and the flying fish took off from one fine wave to scoot for what they might have thought was a finer one, it looked very much like some of the decorative bowls I've eaten out of in our better sea-food restaurants in the city. And often, in relation to its vast circumference, I felt like one of those unexplainable black lumps of something uneatable that always seems to be on the bottom of an oyster stew even in the best restaurants. Of course, this bowl I was sitting in was finer in color quality than any I'd ever eaten out of.