“Are you a flatterer, then?”
“Nay, I mean no flattery. It is only that I have a good ear, and in following your way of speech, I improve my own.”
“Ah. Well said. You are clever, and learn things quickly.”
To this I made no reply.
Don João went on, “This meat is of the thigh of elephanto, and this is a porridge, that takes the place of bread in this land. And this is a bean they call nkasa, that they stew. The oil is the oil of the palm-tree, this being no land for olives. And the wines are the good wines of the Canaries. We have not enough salt here, but otherwise we dine well. Why are you a prisoner, Englishman?”
“For that I was captured.”
“Yes. Yes, I know that. In Brazil, was it?”
“Aye, sir.”
“But prisoners are useless weights. If we did not kill you, we should have put you to some function.”
“That has been done. Governor Serrão used me in a voyage to the presidio of Masanganu, some two years past. But when I returned I fell ill, and upon my recovery I was jailed, I know not why, and I have languished ever since in one of the dungeons beneath the citadel.”
“You are a pilot?”
“That I am.”
“And willing to serve?”
“It is not my prime choice, but I prefer it to captivity.”
“And your prime choice?”
“To return to my England. I have a betrothed in England, and my only dream is to go back to her and make her my wife, and spend the rest of my life on land.”
“Yet you were a pirate in Brazil.”
“A privateer, sir, seeking to win some gold with which to buy my land.”
“To steal some gold, you mean?”
“It would not have been the gold of Portugal, Don João, but rather that of Peru, already stolen once by the Spaniards, and not theirs by God’s main design.”
“Ah,” he said, and said no more a long while, but mopped his bowls and searched in them for more bits of meat. In time he said, “I like you, Battell.”
“Thank you, Don João.”
“I do. You have a rough English honesty about you that pleases me. You do not fawn, you do not lick. When I thought you might be flattering me you said, Nay, I am only copying your way of speech, where one of the captains here might have given me a lengthy song about my elegance of style. I will let you go home, I think.”
I had not expected that. It stunned me so that my tongue was nailed to the roof of my mouth and my jaws hung slack like those of a witless gaffer.
“If you will do some service here first, that is,” he continued.
“Name it, sir!”
“We are shorthanded of mariners here. There is trade to do along this coast, to the kingdom of the Kongo and beyond it northward into Loango, where they have riches that they will exchange for baubles—the teeth and the tails of elephantos, and the oil of palms, and the cloth also that they make of palms, and much more, which we can have for beads and looking-glasses and rough cloth. Of ordinary seamen there are enough, but scarce anyone to command them, and do the navigation, and keep our pinnaces off the reefs. I would have you do some piloting for us, a few voyages, six months’ worth of service, perhaps, or a year, and if you acquit yourself honorably we will put you aboard a ship for Europe, and God go with you.”
My face grew red and I stammered with joy, for this answered all my prayers.
“Don João!” I said. “Don João!”
“Will you serve, then?”
“Aye. And gladly, if I buy my liberty with it.”
“Done, then. Take ye another piece of the hog-fish.”
He shoved the platter at me, and in my delight I cut me a great huge dripping slice, and crammed it down all at once, so that I like to have choked on it but for the gulps of Don João’s precious wine of Lanzarote that I took with easy abandon. He watched me without objection. Already I felt myself halfway back in England, Africa dropping away from me like a sloughed skin, and the morsel of manatee meat in my mouth, strange flavor and fiery of spicing, seemed to me the last strangeness I would have to swallow. O! but I was wrong in that, and strangeness aplenty was waiting for me down the channel of time, and the meat of the gentle sluggish mud-grubbing manatee was hardly the worst of it. But just then I was bound for home, at least in the fancies of my mind, and I thought to myself that this Don João de Mendoça was unlike all other Portugals and Spaniards, a man of sympathy and compassion and true grandeur. I could almost have kissed his boot, but that I have never been the boot-kissing sort to anyone, and might find it hard to make such obeisance even to Her Majesty.
He said, “Dona Teresa speaks highly of you. I think her judgment is the proper one.”
“She is a perceptive woman.”
“Indeed. A rare woman indeed. I have known her many years, Battell. Her father died young and heroically, in the Kongo, and I have been her guardian.”
And something rather other than a guardian, I told myself, but did not say it. A rough English honesty I might truly have, but rough English honesty does not extend to rash looseness of tongue except among fools.
Yet I saw Teresa in my mind’s eye, naked in my cell and oiled with sweat, crouching above me and lowering herself to encompass my pestle within her mortar, and then setting up such a grinding as would turn marble to powder; and I knew that if that image were to leap from my mind to Mendoça’s I would find myself no sea-pilot at all, but a galley-slave or something worse. And I saw also Mendoça, naked and sleek and plump, with his knees between Teresa’s thighs and his hands clasping both her breasts, and that image kindled a fire of turmoil in my own breast that was so dismaying that I compelled myself hastily to think of manatees instead, and elephantos, and the shining fishes of the tropic seas. While my head so swam with these pictures, Don João continued to talk, prating of Dona Teresa’s virtues, her wisdom and command of the arts of music and poetry and her shrewdness, which he said was the equal of any man’s, and her beauty, telling me of her keen luminous eyes and supple limbs and cunning lips as though he were describing some woman of a far-off land. Well, and he had good reason to be delighted in her, and to praise his own good fortune by praising her this way to me. I understood his zeal only too clearly.
It was time now for an end to my audience with him. We had arrived at our compact: I would do some piloting, and then he would turn me loose. It seemed strange to me that the Portugals, who had found all these lands and the far side of Africa as well in the days of Prince Henry the Navigator, these Portugals who had gone off into the misty beyond and discovered even India, would be so reduced as to press an English pilot into their service, in the very seas where Bartholomeu Dias and Vasco da Gama and their other great mariners had won such repute. But evidently the Portugals had fallen upon low times, if they had to have the Spaniard Philip for their king, and why not, then, the English Andrew as their pilot, me who had had only the lightest of training for that task? I thanked Don João de Mendoça once more for his generosity of spirit and also for this meal of rare delicacies.
He clapped his hands and two slaves appeared to clear the table— blacks of some other region of Africa, with flat noses and lips like fillets of beef. One had the ill fortune to stumble and splash some drops of an oily yellow sauce on Don João’s garment, staining it, and with a single smooth unthinking motion Don João scooped up a pewter boat holding another sauce, a fiery hot one, and dashed it across the slave’s face and into his eyes, so that the poor brute cried out and covered his face with his hands and dropped to the floor, rolling over and over and sobbing. Don João spurned him with his foot, pushing him aside, and the slave, crawling on his knees, scuttled from the room, for all I know blinded, or at the least in mighty pain. So it is with these Portugals. Don João was in truth a man of sympathy and compassion and all of that, civilized and humane, maybe the best of all his kind, but even he, for a few spots on his sleeve, would deal out a terrible agony to a fellow creature. It was a useful lesson to me, not that I really needed it, in the complexity of human nature, that I should see Don João as a superior being of great merit, and that he should in reality be quite far from perfection. But perhaps that is a lesson in the simplicity of human nature, namely, my own, that I should have expected total goodness in a Portugal. The unhappy slave might at least be grateful that he did not serve a Spaniard; for then his master might have had him flayed, or worse, for those small flecks of grease.