“I feared I was left alone,” I told him.
“Nay, there are several of us,” said Torner, and led me around the whale’s heavy flukes. “Look ye,” he said, and I beheld three others of our company, Richard Jennings and Richard Fuller and one other whose name the years have washed from my memory. These men had been in divers separate places at the moment of the Indian attack and each had fled a different way into the forest, and one by one had come together here. “God’s wounds,” cried Richard Jennings, a great burly man half as high as an oak tree, “Do you know, Battell, that we were betrayed and abandoned by Cocke the cockless, and will live the rest of our lives among these crabs and other insects?”
“Aye,” I replied, “I know of our betrayal, for I saw the ship depart. But as to the second part I say you nay, friend. I think we will see England again.”
“Do you now? Will dolphins carry us there?”
“God will provide. And if He do not, we must provide for ourselves, or indeed these crabs will be our neighbors forever. Are there others of us here?”
“Just we four,” said Torner, “and you are the fifth. I think there are no others in the part of the island behind us. Were there more in your direction?”
“Only six dead men, rotting and unburied on the beach. But five of us are enough to build a boat and take it to the mainland,” I said, and explained my plan of capturing a Portuguese pinnace in Santos and using it to cross the ocean by small hops and skips and jumps. They listened intently and without scoffing. Fuller was a carpenter’s mate, which gave us a great advantage in this project. We spoke of searching for a fallen tree, and hollowing it for our hull, and such things, and as we talked I understood that I had silently been elected the leader of these men. It surprised me greatly, for I had only a deckhand’s skills and had never held authority of any sort, indeed had in some ways been cramped and diminished by being the youngest of so many brothers. But that counted for nothing here. I was thirty years of age, and strong of body, and such failings or smallnesses of spirit that might have afflicted me in youth were unknown to my companions and had no bearing. I think also it was my determination to reach England again that gleamed like a beacon out of my soul, and gave them courage, and had them turn to me; for until I came upon them, these four had been concerned only with finding food and shelter, and had given no thought to a plan of recovery.
We lunched on the meat of the whale, which was still unspoiled though not much to my liking, and talked long and earnestly of our strategies, and afterward we commenced a search for wood with which to build our craft. Whether we would have fulfilled this project is a question I can never answer, but I tell you that the planning of it gave us hope, without which life would have been cruel indeed for us. An ocean separated me from my Anne Katherine. A tropic sun burned my skin. Buzzing things hovered in clouds, and bit and stung. Nightmare creatures dwelled in the rivers and could march upon us in any moment. Yet I did not despair, for what use has despair? And my strength became the strength of the others. I talked of schemes that even I knew were sheer madness, and made them sound plausible. The one I most clearly remember was a notion of journeying up the whole coast of this southern America, and from isle to isle in the West Indies, and northward aye to Virginia, where Walter Ralegh had founded a colony on Roanoke Island. In my mind that distance was not so great, although in fact it is nigh as far as sailing to Africa, and we would be in enemy waters all the way. But the idea, rash or not, sustained us for a few days. And in the end the rashness of it mattered not at all, since we never had a chance to put it in practice, owing to the return of the Indians to the island.
They came upon us as stealthy as cats. A canoe laden with them landed on the west side of our island, and they made their way through the woods and emerged out of the mists of dawn, surrounding us in a ring with drawn bows. Their bows were long and black and their arrows long also, with heads of sharpened cane, and they would have skewered us wonderfully had we given any resistance. But to resist was folly. These Indians were naked, and some were painted in quarters with their paints, others by halves, and others all over, like a tapestry. They all had their lips pierced; some had bones in them, though many had not. All were shaven to above the ears; likewise their eyelids and eyelashes were shaven. All their foreheads were painted with black paint from temple to temple, so that it seemed they were wearing a ribbon round them two inches wide. Their chieftain spoke to us in jabber, or so it seemed, “Umma thumma hoola hay,” and words like that, which he repeated five or seven times.
Torner said to me, “You have the knack of languages, Andy. Tell him we mean no harm, that we are enemies of the Portugals, and hope to be friends of his folk.”
“Shall I say it in umma and thumma?” I asked.
The chief spoke again. I tried to imitate it, though learning a language at the point of an arrow is wondrously ticklish. We might have spoken nonsense back and forth at each other all morning, until they lost patience and slew us, but then the chief said a few words in unmistakable Portuguese, and the words were, “You come with us.”
To my comrades I said, “These are tame Indians, that belong to the Portugals, I think. We will not be slain, but I think will be made slaves.”
“Better to be slain,” muttered Richard Jennings.
“Nay,” I said, “dead men never escape, but lie dead forever. Slavery is less permanent. And these Indians do but save us the trouble of getting ourselves to Santos.”
So the Indians took us over to the mainland in their canoe, a boat that they had made of a whole tree. When we came to the shore of that place we saw a town of some hundreds of people, very silent, and out of the silence we heard the ringing of a bell. “It must be Sunday,” said Torner, and we all spat, for we knew by that bell that the Portugals were at their Mass, and at that same instant the friar was holding up the bread of sacrament before the people for them to worship it. So it was, for the Indians marched us right to the church, and would have thrust us clear inside. But a Portugal in leather breeches came out and forbade it, saying, “You may not enter. You are not Christians.”
I translated that for the others and high color came to Richard Fuller’s face and he cried, “I would not enter that building even to shit in it!” and such. The Portugal, I think, understood some English, or else he knew the essence of Fuller’s words from his tone, for his eyes grew very cold and he took from his neck a heavy crucifix of silver, and put it in front of Richard Fuller’s mouth and commanded him to kiss it. I knew what Fuller was apt to do, and I began to say, “Have care,” but it was too late, for Fuller had already gathered in his mouth a gob of spittle and let it fly over the image of Jesus and the Portugal’s hand. Whereupon the Portugal took his silver idol and struck it across Richard Fuller’s mouth to split his lips and break his teeth and send blood into his beard, and then thrust its end into Richard Fuller’s gut so hard that the man retched and puked; and then he waved his hand and the Indians took Fuller away toward some trees behind the town. We never saw him again. I could not then believe that one European would have another one slain in this strange land for mere disrespect for a Popish idol, except perhaps a Spaniard might, but I thought higher of the Portugals. So I believed they only had Fuller kept in solitary confinement to punish him for impiety. But since those days I have seen much of the world and its cruelties, and I now know that blood is shed for even more trivial reasons, sometimes for no reasons at all, by Portugals and Spaniards and French and Dutch and everyone else, and even an Englishman is capable of murdering a man for a fancied or real slight to his religion, though perhaps he would hold court on him first. Did not King Henry have a man’s head struck off for eating meat on Fridays, and others for denying certain tenets of the Creed, and did not Queen Mary burn good Protestants like roasting-oxen for speaking out against the Pope? I think this is not the way of Jesus, but it is the way of princes and men, and not uncommon.